About Aerosols
Household Recycling
Over 75% of local authorities collect aerosols in their can banks along with drinks cans or through their kerbside collection schemes.
To find out if your local authority is amongst them, contact your local recycling officer. If they do not include aerosols, encourage them to think about it and to speak to the British Aerosol Manufacturers' Association or look on this website to find out more about it. If your local authority does collect aerosols, remember - DO NOT PIERCE THEM OR SQUASH THEM and only put EMPTY AEROSOLS in the collection schemes. It helps if you can remove any plastic parts that come off easily such as lids. More advice on recycling is available on www.recycle-more.co.uk
You will find a useful list of recycling officers at: http://www.letsrecycle.com/info/localauth/recycling_officers.jsp
Who's Recycling?
75% of local authorities in the UK recycle empty aerosols through their can banks or kerbside collection schemes, and this number is increasing week on week.
The Potential for Recycling
Each year, the UK uses around 600 million aerosols.
On average that's 10 cans per person or 27 cans per household.
Aerosols account for 4% of the metals packaging stream. We estimate that there are about 25,000 tonnes of tinplated steel and 4,500 tonnes of high grade aluminium available from recycling aerosol in the UK.
- Markets exist for the materials recovered:
-
- detinning recovers tin and high grade steel
- steel scrap is essential in new steel production
- aluminium aerosols are made from 99.7% pure aluminium with a high resale value.