Where there's muck there's brass, and for 76-year-old Olive Taylor the streets are paved with gold.

Olive has amassed a £30,000 fortune in seven years by combing the streets of Brighton picking up empty drink cans.

She said: "It's terrible - I just can't stop doing it. When I see a can, it's like seeing a pound coin on the floor."

Olive, of Evelyn Terrace, Brighton, never returns home from a shopping trip without a bag full of cans or other bits of copper or aluminium scrap, much to the consternation of Brighton and Hove City Council.

She said: "Every Christmas the council sends me a letter telling me to tidy my garden up. But I tell them it's not rubbish - it's recycling. I'm doing them a favour picking rubbish off the streets."

Olive crushes the cans with her feet, pops them into a ramshackle pushchair and walks several miles to a scrap metal dealer in New England Street and exchanges them for cash.

Although Olive has amassed a fortune with her obsession, she is not jetting off to a sun-kissed beach or splashing out on a car.

Instead she will hand it all over to the PDSA PetAid animal hospital in Robertson Road, Brighton, on Wednesday.

She has raised money for the organisation since 1968 and has already bought equipment worth several thousands of pounds by recycling cans.

She said: "I don't want the money. I opened an account to raise money for the PDSA and I've been putting it in ever since.

"I will never raise money for charities which use a large amount of the donations on admin costs and the PDSA do such good work. The money will pay for enough drugs for the animals for a year. I like to see what the money I raise is spent on.

"I don't need the money. I have a little job and a pension and I don't drink or smoke or take holidays."

Olive's obsession with scrimping, saving and recycling stems from her early years in pre-war Bermondsey, where she was born in 1925.

She said: "Young people nowadays are easy come, easy go. They throw things away. When I was young you had to work really, really hard to buy anything and didn't just throw things away."

The recycling bug bit when she worked with a blind colleague in the civil service in the docks at Gosport, Hampshire.

He owned a guide dog and the charity which paid it raised money by collecting aluminium. Olive began collecting foil and collected so much she bought four guide dogs.