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2000: A ‘VINTAGE’ YEAR FOR STEEL PACKAGING RECYCLING
October 2001 |
On average, one in two steel packs placed on the European market or a total of 1,670,000 tonnes of steel packaging was recycled in 2000 in 13 European countries. This represents a 15% increase on 1999 results when a total of 1,450,000 tonnes was recycled. A significant contribution to this growth was made in Spain, the United Kingdom (with respectively 33% and 34% recycling rates) and Italy (increasing from 9.5% to 26%).
According to Philippe Wolper, Director General of APEAL, the industry will not rest on its laurels in 2002: “In Ireland, REPAK has started a multi-material kerbside collection programme in Dublin. In Greece, collection systems for household packaging are still in their infancy and our industry is keen to co-operate with the Greek can-makers in order to set up a steel packaging recycling consortium in early 2002.”
More and more countries are now champions of steel packaging recycling in the EU: Luxembourg with an unrivalled 93%, Germany and Austria approaching the 80% mark whilst Belgium and the Netherlands achieved 77%. Sweden and Denmark follow with recycling rates close to 70%. Portugal, Italy and Finland have now exceeded the 15% minimum recycling rate of Directive 94/62/EC and look set to continue their progress in 2001. Owing to vastly differing national waste management infrastructures and based on projections made by APEAL, a 50% recycling rate of metal packaging for each member state to be reached by 2006 nevertheless seems unrealistic.
In 1991, about 660,000 tonnes of steel packaging were recycled in the European Union. Since then, an additional 1 million tonnes has been diverted from landfills, an indication of the positive progress made over the last 10 years.
Magnetism –Mother Nature’s helping hand
All collection systems for steel packaging recycling are adapted to the local situations and comprise a combination of multi-material kerbside collection schemes, ‘bring systems’ for metal cans and integral collection (steel packaging being collected together with household refuse). For steel, these collection systems integrating various materials and all steel packaging applications are the optimal solution, since separate collection restricted to one type of packaging (e.g. those for steel beverage cans alone) rarely have environmental or economic justification.
The automatic magnetic separation of steel packaging in municipal household waste incineration plants, compost and sorting centres is ensured by electromagnets, which efficiently provides a valuable flow of used steel beverage cans, aerosols, food cans and other steel containers – all of which can be recycled indefinitely into a wide range of new steel products without any loss of quality.
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