Dive Brief:
- An international coalition of aluminum producers, recyclers, can makers, industry associations and related stakeholders have set a target to recycle at least 80% of aluminum beverage cans worldwide by 2030 and nearly all by 2050.
- They’re calling for greater commitment from national governments and the aluminum beverage can value chain to increase recycling rates, said Marlen Bertram, the International Aluminum Institute’s director of scenarios and forecast, in a press release. Reaching those goals is “a must” for the aluminum sector to decarbonize “in line with a 1.5-degree slope.”
- The announcement came last week in conjunction with the United Nations climate change conference happening in Dubai, known as COP28. U.S.-based groups endorsing actions to achieve the goals include the Aluminum Association and Can Manufacturers Institute, along with Ball, Crown and Novelis.
Dive Insight:
The U.S. EPA laid out its National Recycling Strategy in 2021, a road map to achieving a 50% national recycling rate by 2030. The strategy does not set a recycling target specific to aluminum beverage cans. For 2018, EPA says that the total recycling rate of aluminum containers and packaging was 50.4%, based on industry data from the Aluminum Association to calculate recycling statistics.
A 2021 report from the Aluminum Association and CMI showed the consumer recycling rate for aluminum cans was 45.2% in 2020, versus a 20-year average of about 50%. The Aluminum Association has not shared an updated report since then, noting that it “identified significant anomalies in key Census Bureau data that appear to be artificially inflating the aluminum beverage can recycling rate” and it hopes to “resolve this issue in the coming months and report several years of recycling rates in 2024.”
To the Aluminum Association’s and CMI’s knowledge, the announcement at COP28 is the first such international, industrywide commitment of its kind around recycling aluminum beverage cans. Other manufacturers internationally that signed on include Ardagh Metal Packaging, Constellium and Canpack.
“This seemed like kind of low-hanging fruit for the industry,” said Matt Meenan, vice president of external affairs at the Aluminum Association. Sharing it at COP28 puts it in front of governments and NGOs, said Meenan. “It’s not some pie in the sky new technology. It's simply a matter of, I think, educating the public and also having policies put in place that encourage the recycling of material that doesn't need to end up in a landfill.”
The actions include establishing national and/or state-level recycling targets for aluminum beverage cans; backing those targets with policy; collecting and publishing data on can recovery rates, including tracking the global recycling rate; scaling up recycling capacity; and prioritizing can-to-can recycling and maximizing recycled content by optimizing alloy design and scrap purification.
CMI’s own U.S. recycling targets for aluminum beverage cans, which the Aluminum Association supports, are for a 70% recycling rate by 2030, 80% by 2040 and 90% by 2050. While CMI continues to work toward those previously set goals, the new commitment helps coordination and collaboration with metal associations and individual companies globally, said Scott Breen, vice president of sustainability at CMI.
Both CMI and the Aluminum Association advocate for container deposit programs, what those groups are calling recycling refunds.
“To get up into the 70, 80, 90% range is difficult without new recycling refund programs. And we've been very clear that without new and improved recycling refund programs in the United States, it would be very difficult to achieve our targets,” Breen said. CMI is focused on related legislation in Illinois, Minnesota and Washington in 2024.
Meenan expressed a similar sentiment. “If we're going to hit anything close to this sort of target in the next couple of decades, we're going to have to be quick. And so we we have gotten pretty aggressive on promoting, endorsing and advocating for recycling refund programs,” he said.
