WELLINGTON - The village of Wellington along with help from the Citizens Volunteer Organization and local schools collected 935 pounds of aluminum cans in October for the Cans for Cash City Recycling Challenge.

The Cans for Cash challenge is sponsored by the United States Conference of Mayors in partnership with Keep America Beautiful and Novelis. It pits like-sized cities against each other to see which can collect the most aluminum cans.

The winners will be announced in January. Programs Manager for the U.S. Conference for Mayors Susan Jarvis said one of last year's winners Hesperia, Calif., collected 951 pounds.

The four $5,000 awards will be divided up by the city's population so like-sized cities will compete against each other.

In Wellington the village sponsored a local challenge to see which schools could collects the most cans. Wellington Elementary won the challenge, second place went to Polo Park and third place went to Wellington Landings.

Jarvis said the challenge started because they wanted to bring more awareness to recycling. She said it made sense because they already had a relationship with Novelis, a company that claims to be world's leader in recycling of aluminum beverage cans. Jarvis said the company recycles 35 billion cans a year.

"Aluminum cans are 100 percent recyclable," she said. "We just wanted to raise awareness. There's no reason aluminum cans should be sitting in landfills. So we dedicated the month of October to recycling."

Jarvis said last year more than 3 million cans were collected. Last year the winners were Milwaukee, Wis.; Fontana, Calif.; Hesperia, Calif.; and University City, Mo.

Jesse Wright, Solid Waste and Recycling Supervisor for Wellington, had said he hoped the challenge would get people interested in recycling, but also noted that Wellington already has a strong and vibrant recycling program.