In this contributed photo, members of the Cans for the Community board make a ,000 donation to Meals on Wheels of Lawrence on Jan. 26, 2018.

Since 2005, Linda Klinker and a group of 15 volunteers have been collecting aluminum cans — more than 13 million cans — and donating the proceeds to nonprofits in the Lawrence community.

Now, Cans for the Community is preparing to make a milestone donation: the $1,000 the group will donate to the Visiting Nurses Association on March 4 will mark $200,000 in total donations since the group formed.

“We’re just a bunch of can-crazy people. In May 2005, we started this nonprofit because we wanted to recycle cans and keep them out of landfills,” said Klinker, who chairs the Cans for the Community Board of Directors. “We decided we’re all going to be volunteers, nobody’s going to get paid, we’re not going to have an office, and we’re going to donate 100 percent of our profits.”

Not only is the VNA receiving Cans for the Community’s most recent milestone donation, but they also received the group’s first donation, as well as several milestones in between.

This contributed photo shows a Cans for the Community can

“We really appreciate what they do, and several of us have used Visiting Nurses in our personal lives,” Klinker said. “We kind of come back to them every time we seem to have a milestone. But we’ve given to just about every nonprofit in the community, and also to the Lawrence Schools we’ve given close to $20,000 in donations over the years.”

Cynthia Lewis, CEO of VNA, said the organization is always grateful for donations via groups like Cans for the Community.

“We are very honored and excited at them choosing us,” Lewis said. “Linda has a lot of great energy and they’ve donated lots of money to organizations over the years.”

Cans for the Community’s efforts took a slight hit in October 2014 when the City of Lawrence implemented a more streamlined curbside recycling program. But Klinker said in more recent years, the group has still been able to collect upward of 30,000 pounds of cans per year.

“The first year, we were down about 500 pounds a month, and we thought, ‘Oh, this is going to doom us,” she said. “But I think we’re back up. Last year we had more cans than the year before. It affected us, but it kind of seems like we’re holding our own (now).”

Klinker said the easiest way for Lawrence residents to donate their cans is simply keeping aluminum cans separate from the city recycling bins and taking them to the group’s dozen or so “can houses” stationed around town.

“We just want people to take them there,” she said. “And we have several businesses, too, we have over 100 businesses that support us and we pick up their cans, and that helps.”

Klinker said the group is always looking for volunteers to pick up cans and businesses to donate their cans. Cans for the Community provides the container and picks them up when they are full, she said. The group’s goal is simply to make recycling easy.

“We’re totally amazed. I don’t think in our wildest dreams that we thought we could recycle enough cans to donate $200,000,” she said. “And before curbside recycling, we’d had a couple years where we gave away $25,000 a year. To get to $200,000, I think most of us are kind of amazed.”