My dad designed and built a wall mounted lever device in the garage with a trash can over it... it had a cylindrical opening that was angled slightly towards you when facing it, you'd pull the lever down and it would straighten up and the can would be crushed from the top down to a little aluminum puck, then when you raise the lever back up... the cylinder would tip forward and the aluminum puck would fall out of a slot in the bottom into a trash can.
Usually he would just walk out to the garage with an empty and crush it, but occasionally there would be a small container with a few dozen that he'd have me load - crunch - load - crunch.... but I didn't mind because that compressed bag didn't take up as much space and he'd let me keep the money after we dropped it at the metal recycle.
It's kind of funny to me now that Michigan and Indiana have different recycle rules/laws/deposit fees... so you have to drop them at the grocery store intact so their machine can read the barcode.