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Aluminum Foil Containers and Foil Wrap
The average household produces 0.21 kilograms of aluminum foil per year. Aluminum foil consists of 0.59% of the total waste stream and locally 43.1% of all aluminum foil produced is recovered.
What is Acceptable? All Aluminum foil containers such as pie plates, catering trays and the like as well as aluminum foil wrap are acceptable for collection.
How to Prepare Material: Please rinse and place loose in your blue box. Food residues adversely affect recovery of the materials in the furnace. Contaminated foil also poses safety and health concerns.
What Happens after the Material Leaves your Blue Box? Aluminum foil containers and foil wrap are mixed with other container materials on the collection truck and brought back to the Bluewater MRF in Huron Park, Ontario. This material is then dumped onto the tipping floor. The Association utilizes several technology based pieces of equipment and only four people to sort all the containers collected from 125,000 people. One person will look at the mix of containers to ensure that the mix is prepared for the equipment. This means that plastic bags are opened and removed, large items such as pails and broken blue boxes are removed, as well as all of the aluminum foil containers and foil wrap. Once the aluminum foil containers and foil wrap is removed from the sortation line, it is stored in dolleys or depot carts. When there is enough material stored, it is sent to the baler, which produces bales of material of a uniform size and shape. From here the material is ready for market.
What Happens after the Material Leaves Bluewater? Foil wrap itself is almost pure aluminum, a good useable scrap. But unlike Used Beverage Cans (UBC's) which are recycled into the same product stream, foil wrap is not used by aluminum foil companies in the manufacture of new aluminum foil; it feeds other material streams instead. Because foil is free of most alloying agents, it is desirable for many metal streams, serving primarily as a "sweetener" in scrap furnaces. Aluminum that contains recycled foil is used in the production of automobile parts and castings, siding and other utility-type application.
By comparison, foil-formed containers, such as pie plates and roaster plates, are made with a mixture of alloys. The main difference between a foil-formed container and foil wrap is the former contains 1% manganese for rigidity. The foil-formed container scrap normally goes into the production of beverage cans, the foundry alloy stream and potentially back into foil-formed containers.
For more information, click here for another fact sheet. |
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