From Production to Recycling

Beverage cans are made of tinplate or aluminium. After use, the cans are recycled and transformed into new high-quality metal products or even new beverage cans. The beverage can is therefore a true "recycling product".

The life cycle of a can

The can body is supplied to the beverage producer from the beverage can production plants. There the cans are filled and sealed with the separately delivered ends.  Via the retail trade, beverage cans reach  the consumer who disposes of the empty cans through the various national return systems operating in Europe.  Nowadays recycling quotas of up to 90% are achieved, depending on the country.

The beverage cans are segregated from other types of waste in the sorting units at recycling companies.  The magnetic properties of the tinplate cans enable then to be segregated easily and economically using a magnet. Eddy current separators can also be used to segregate aluminium cans from other waste without any difficulty.  Aluminium in particular can be easily and cost-effectively recycled: The melting down process requires a mere five per cent of the energy needed to produce primary aluminium.

The scrap tinplate is compressed and melted down together with other scrap steel in the converter at the steel mill.  Neither the thin layer of tin on the tinplate nor the aluminium can end have any negative effect on the melting process. The aluminium oxidises in the molten steel. It passes into the accumulating slag which is used in the construction industry. During this process energy is released which in turn is used to melt down more scrap. Varnish, paint and other additives are completely burned at melt temperature of 1600°C.

Different types of furnaces are available to melt down aluminium scrap.  Scrap metal for use as casting alloys are melted down predominantly in rotary drum-type furnaces under a cover layer of liquid flux salt. Different types of open hearth furnaces are used to produce wrought alloys. For the alloy production process, a refining stage is provided downstream of rotary drum-type furnaces. This involves conveying the molten alloys to a holding furnace (converter) where they are purified by adding refining agents. The molten aluminium is cast to ingots or transported to the foundry as molten metal. The cast ingots weigh between 4 and 25 kilogrammes depending on the ingot moulds.  Molten aluminium is transported to the foundries in pre-heated thermo containers. There the molten metal is filled into thermal holding furnaces and processed straightaway.

At the steel mill, the raw steel is cast to so-called slab ingots in the casting unit.  After cooling and solidification, the warm slab ingots are rolled out to 0.2 mm thick black plate, which is the starting material for tinplate packaging.  Rolled up into so-called coils, it is supplied to the tinplate plant for further processing.  There the plate is rolled out to a thickness of  0.1 mm in cold-rolling processes and then tin-plated in an electrolytic process.

The tinplate or aluminium obtained through recycling is coiled and then supplied to the beverage can plant again.