Recycling and social responsibility
Aluminium material is fully recyclable, endlessly, without any loss of quality. Increasing collection, recycling and recovery rates for aluminium foil means that less and less primary aluminium will be required by the industry.
This could represent significant energy savings as processing recycled aluminium requires up to 95% less energy than the equivalent quantity of primary metal. The amount of aluminium packaging recycled greatly depends on the efficiency of the national packaging collection schemes in each country. In Europe, it is assumed that average recycling rate of all aluminium packaging is above 60%.
In the situations where an aluminium foil packaging is not collected separately for recycling and enters an energy recovery process, a significant proportion of its aluminium content can be collected from the bottom ashes for recycling. The part of aluminium which is oxidized during incineration is releasing energy which is recovered and converted back to heat and electricity.
As member of ASI (The Aluminium Stewardship Initiative), GLAFRI supports the continuous improvement on key environmental, social and governance impacts of aluminium production, use and recycling within a credible assurance and certification system.
Based on arecent webinar on ‚Alufoil Sorting and Recycling‘ an overview on modern technologies was published by International ALUMINIUM Journal. In addition to the summaries of the presentations from our webinar the overview includes also a statement of the chair of the Central Agency Packaging Register in Germany with regard to the recycling of aluminium foil in composites as well as of often so called ‚mono‘ paper based alternatives.