'Make Your Metals Matter' campaign comes to Powys' streets

The metal they are made from is endlessly recyclable and Powys County Council (PCC) is determined to make sure every last one makes it into your red recycling box so that they can be transformed into something new.

Teaming up with the metal packaging manufacturing industry, PCC has launched the ‘Make Your Metals Matter’ campaign, targeting all 67,000 households.

The campaign will include leaflets sent to every home, recycling vehicle signage, newspaper adverts, recycling centre banners and will be supported with local roadshows and a social media campaign.

The council is reminding residents to recycle all of the metal packaging found around their home, including:

• Food and drink cans
• Foil trays
• Empty aerosols
• Metal screw tops – from glass bottles and jars
• Household aluminium wrapping foil – used for baking or wrapping leftovers

If all of the metal packaging used in Powys’ homes each year was collected for recycling it would save around 2,150 tonnes of carbon dioxide, the equivalent to taking over 458 cars off local streets for a year.

Used metal packaging can be recycled into new products at a far lower cost to the environment than making them from raw materials. Making drinks cans from recycled material saves up to 95 per cent of the energy and greenhouse gas emissions needed to make both aluminium and steel from raw materials. What’s more, every time metal passes through the recycling loop the benefits are repeated, again and again and again!

Cllr Phyl Davies, PCC’s Cabinet Member for Recycling and Waste, said: “Powys residents are already committed to recycling and reducing waste which is great news. We want to encourage our residents to think about metal packaging found throughout their home, not just in the kitchen but in the bathroom, and bedroom.

“Food and drink cans, foil and empty aerosols are all easily and endlessly recyclable. Don’t forget every can recycled saves enough energy to run a TV for four hours – so a small action like putting your empty bean tin into your red recycling box can make a big difference.”

MetalMatters campaigns have run in 99 local authority areas and reached over 6 million households since 2012. The Powys campaign is being jointly funded by MetalMatters, an industry partnership comprising the UK’s leading producers, users and recyclers of metal packaging and PCC. The MetalMatters programme is managed by the Aluminium Packaging Recycling Organisation (Alupro) on behalf of the funding partners.

Rick Hindley, executive director of project managers Alupro, said: “It is great to be able to work in partnership with PCC to promote the recycling of metal packaging. This campaign has delivered significant increases in the amount of metal packaging collected for recycling in other parts of the UK, so we are aiming to repeat – and hopefully better this – in Powys.”