Recycling aluminium helps the environment and economy. By recycling it we:
- conserve mineral resources
- reduce energy consumption from mining and transportation
- reduce waste to landfill.
Aluminium cans can take up to 500 years to decompose in landfill. To help save natural resources and reduce landfill, always recycle.
What aluminium can I recycle?
In your kerbside recycling bin, you can place:
- aluminium drink cans
- aluminium aerosol cans
- clean aluminium pie trays
- crushed al-foil.
Avoid placing large aluminium items like bike frames in your recycling bin. These items can damage machinery used in the recycling process.
Recycling tips
- Rinse and squash aluminium drink cans (do not squash aerosol cans).
- Remove lids and plastic nozzles from aerosols.
Aluminium cans
Aluminium cans are 100 percent recyclable. It takes much less energy (just 5 percent) to recover aluminium, than to manufacture new aluminium.
One tonne of recycled aluminium cans will make one tonne of new aluminium, with no waste material. In fact, we can recycle 20 aluminium cans with the same amount of energy it takes to make one new can.
Where does my recycled aluminium go?
We take recycled aluminium cans to our Materials Recovery Facility (MRF) and crush them into bales. A reprocessing facility then melts the bales in a rotary furnace at a high temperature (7000 degrees celsius). Once melted, aluminium is:
- cast into ingots – used to produce industrial products like alloy gear boxes and engine blocks
- rolled into aluminium sheets – used to produce new aluminium cans, house siding, roof guttering and even aircraft skins.
How new aluminium is made
Aluminium is made from the ore, bauxite. This consists mainly of aluminium and iron oxides and clay. In Australia we mine bauxite in Queensland (Weipa), Northern Territory (Gove) and Western Australia (Boddington, Huntly and Willowdale).
To make aluminium:
- Bauxite is crushed and mixed with caustic soda to remove impurities.
- The resulting alumina (a fine white powder) is then heated and dried.
- Aluminium is then smelted in a large steel furnace to remove oxygen.
- Small amounts of the magnesium, silicon or manganese are added to increase strength and resist corrosion.
- The purified aluminium is poured into ingots or rolled into thin sheets.
Using this extraction process, it takes 5 tonnes of bauxite to produce 1 tonne of aluminium.