Ha ha ha! When I was in high school I did that, and made way more than $2/day before others in the area caught on.
MI 10c cans + hotel parking lot trash cans. $14/day. Car to hotel row, then walk the lots. Easy money. Also, fun bonuses. Free porno mags, a giant free box of misbranded hotel soaps (still wrapped), another giant free thing of some cleaning stuff, a broken golf club (great for digging through the garb without getting nasty), and other random finds.
There were some days that were notably better than others. I never missed a Thursday, and I hardly ever bothered with a Monday. Thursdays were great. The tour buses would stop in on Thursdays and all those out-of-state idiots would just throw their cans out. MI has the 10c deposit, and it had just come in about a year before so people were still in the habit of just chucking those cans away.
This thread has brought the nostalgia up. It's too bad that other people realized I wasn't crazy for "pickin'." By the time I gave it up, it had been oversaturated to death and no longer paid enough to cover the gas to get to where the hotels were.