As part of a concerted effort to increase aluminum beverage can recycling, Ardagh Metal Packaging (AMP) and Crown Holdings (Crown), working with its trade organization Can Manufacturers Institute (CMI), are providing financing for leases of can capture equipment for recycling facilities.
While continuing to offer grants as the two aluminum can manufacturers funded last year, the lease option allows material recovery facilities (MRFs) to receive equipment at no cost and pay it off through the additional cans captured with the equipment.
“CMI modeling finds that if all of the more than 350 MRFs sorting residential recyclables across the U.S. had perfect sortation of used beverage cans (UBC), 3.5 billion cans could potentially be captured,” said Jennifer Cumbee, chief sustainability officer at AMP. “We are committed to continuing to activate additional can capture equipment in MRFs as part of our industry’s effort to build on our industry-leading recycling and recycled content rates, further strengthening the beverage can as the ideal sustainability choice for our customers.”
To substantiate the economic and environmental impact of additional can capture equipment, AMP and Crown funded in-person testing at three MRFs that showed significant opportunities for capturing missorted cans. The testing focused on five points across the three MRFs where cans tend to be missorted. Those five points averaged between seven and 36 aluminum UBCs missorted every minute.
The testing is part of a growing initiative to motivate installation of can capture equipment in MRFs. In addition to the testing program, CMI also today released online two additional resources for MRFs to determine the benefits of additional can capture equipment. One is an easy-to-use return on investment (ROI) calculator to determine the ROI from installing additional can capture equipment. The other is a companion playbook that explains how to test levels of can missortation and then plug the data collected into the ROI calculator.
MRF operators interested in having testing done at their facility or financing options from CMI should reach out to CMI’s Scott Breen at sbreen@cancentral.com. The free ROI calculator, the playbook and more on the efforts of AMP and Crown through CMI to stimulate additional can capture equipment in MRFs can be found at www.cancentral.com/cansdriverecycling.
Published in the September 2022 Edition