As packaging manufacturers, brand owners and retailers continue to focus on traceability, product identification and increasingly sophisticated barcoding technologies, the substrate on which this information appears remains equally important.

For metal packaging, its ability to protect products, withstand demanding supply chains and retain value after use makes it an important contributor to South Africa’s transition towards a more circular economy, metal packaging industry producer responsibility organisation MetPac-SA CEO Dr Kishan Singh says.

“Metal packaging has an important advantage in that the material itself retains significant economic and resource value [and] after use the package can become a valuable feedstock for another manufacturing process rather than being lost to landfill.”

Metal packaging is manufactured primarily from two material groups – aluminium and tinplate, or ferrous steel. Although both are highly recyclable, they enter different recycling and remelting streams and therefore need to be correctly separated during collection and sorting.

Aluminium

The aluminium packaging stream encompasses considerably more than beverage cans, notes Singh. “It includes used beverage cans, aerosols, foil packaging and trays, wine bottle caps and closures, pharmaceutical collapsible tubes and coffee pods.”

Once discarded, these materials enter the recycling chain through waste pickers, collection programmes, buy back centres and other recovery channels. They are aggregated and sorted, contaminants and non-metal components are removed, and the prepared aluminium scrap is supplied to specialised remelting facilities. There it is converted into aluminium ingots or slabs which can be used as secondary raw material for manufacturing.

Depending on the grade and processing requirements, this recycled aluminium can be rolled into sheet or used in the manufacture of a variety of other aluminium products.

Steel

The ferrous packaging stream, meanwhile, includes food cans, general-line cans, paint and polish cans, caps and closures. Because steel is a ferrous metal, it can be efficiently separated from other materials through magnetic sorting.

Recovered steel packaging is cleaned, sorted and prepared as scrap before being transported to steelmaking facilities, where it is typically combined with other ferrous scrap and remelted, Singh explains.

"The resulting recycled steel can be used in products such as reinforcing bar, structural steel and other applications.”

A Value Chain Responsibility

MetPac-SA emphasises that circularity cannot be achieved by recyclers alone. Consumers and waste pickers need to recover packaging; collectors and buy-back centres must aggregate it; recyclers must sort and process it; re-melters convert the scrap back into usable metal; and manufacturers create demand by using recovered material in new products.

For Singh, this makes collaboration across the packaging value chain increasingly important.

“The future of packaging will not only be about what we place on the shelf or what information we communicate through a label or barcode. We also have to consider what happens to that package once the consumer is finished with it. Effective packaging needs to perform throughout its entire life cycle,” he avers.

He concludes that recycling keeps valuable resources circulating in the economy, supports greater resource efficiency and diverts recyclable material from landfill; principles that are central to building a more circular economy.