Can You Recycle Aluminum Foil?
You've eaten your takeout burrito and have a ball of sour cream-specked aluminum foil left over. Does it go in the blue bin or the thrash?
Aluminum cans are the quintessential easy recyclable. There's no draconian number-sorting scheme, no lids to remove and usually the quickest of rinses serves to get them clean. Beverage cans are infinitely recyclable, as they can be processed into new cans, sheet metal or anything else aluminum any number of times, without the material degrading or losing strength- unlike plastic, which rapidly turns into trash, if it's ever recycled at all.
The same is true of all other consumer aluminum products. Aluminum foil, trays, pans and take-out containers are ALL eminently recyclable. In theory, any used aluminum can be melted down and remade into just-like-new aluminum items.
"Across the country, recycling programs want your soda cans. That's the most surefire thing that's going to be included in the list of accepted items."
There are a few reasons aluminum foil might not be accepted for municipal recycling where you live, but the biggest factor is economic. "Aluminum foil is a little less valuable than aluminum cans. It's just a bit flimsier, so there might be less desire for it". The facilities that sort recycling sell it to buyers in bales. But there are fewer buyers out there interested in bales that contain foil than there are buyers eager to accept all-can bundles.
Additionally, not all sorting facilities are equally well-equipped. At Sims, which is the largest mixed recycling processor in the U.S. and serves the entire city of New York, the sorting line and machinery allows for teeny tiny bits of metal to be separated out from everything else. Foil collected from recycling doesn't need to be any certain size or shape to make it into the correct bundle and small bits of foil don't cause contaminarion elsewhere. But for other facilities, small aluminum scraps are unlikely to end up recycled.
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