Let’s take a look at the recycling of aluminium cans. Did you know that it takes 95 per cent less energy to recycle aluminium cans than it does to make new ones? Making them from raw materials (bauxite) is an energy-intensive process, using the same amount of energy to make one new can as it does to recycle twenty. Aluminium can be recycled indefinitely without loss of quality (unlike plastic) and 75 per cent of all the aluminium ever made is still in circulation – in a positive way!
If we recycled all the aluminium cans we use in the UK annually, 600 per average UK household, (dear reader, that surely cannot be any of us reading this … !), we would need 14 million fewer dustbins. Recycling just one tonne of aluminium saves up to nine tonnes of CO2 emissions.
BUT…
How sad is it then to find out that around 80 million cans are sent to landfill/incineration in the UK each year? More frustrating still to find cans rolling around our towns and villages, which have been tossed out of cars, dropped in hedges, ditches and on pavements. So it is really important that if folks are away from home they take cans home to recycle them later.
If you see a lonely can along your daily walk, why not keep a paper bag in your shopping bag, pick up the can, carry it home and recycle it, knowing that it will be back on the shelf as a new can within 60 days! You can find out how by clicking on this link to a short but fascinating film. Encourage your friends, family, neighbours to do the same so we make full use of this incredibly useful resource.
