Both aluminium and tinplate are considered highly recyclable packaging materials. While aluminium often scores points for its light weight, a closer look reveals: tinplate excels in terms of recycling and sustainability – thanks to its efficiency, practical advantages and impressive recovery rates.
Packaging Materials Compared – Recycling and Sustainability
Aluminium: Highly Recyclable – But With Limitations
Aluminum is regarded as a lightweight and corrosion-resistant material with high recycling potential. In theory, it can be recycled infinitely without losing quality – and re-melting it saves a very high percentage of energy compared to primary production. These advantages make it an attractive material in many industries.
However, recycling aluminum comes with some challenges. Separation from other waste streams is more complex because aluminum is not magnetic. It requires special sorting plants or manual pre-selection. Although the aluminum recycling rate according to the German Packaging Act was an impressive 95% in 2022, the rate drops significantly at the EU level — down to only 63.6%. The reason: The EU only counts the rate when the material is actually reused in new products. This shows that a large portion of collected aluminum does not yet complete the full recycling process. Why? Aluminum packaging with product residues (especially chemical residues) can only be recycled with great effort or enormous costs, because heating to 700–750 °C during recycling is insufficient to completely thermally decompose the remaining residues of the previous contents.
Tinplate: Efficient Recycling With Clear System Advantages
The recycling process of tinplate is technically mature and especially resource-conserving. As tin-coated steel sheet, tinplate has a property that makes it particularly valuable in the recycling process: its magnetizability. This enables extremely simple and reliable separation from waste streams – fully automated and without complex sorting technologies. This not only increases the recovery rate but also significantly reduces the error rate in the recycling process.
Reprocessing typically occurs in blast furnaces or converters at around 1,600 °C, where all organic residues – such as paints or plastic coatings – are completely burned off. The result is a pure, high-quality recycled material that can be reused without any loss in quality. Whether it's a food can, bucket, or cartridge – tinplate forms an endless material loop.
The numbers also speak clearly: In Germany, the recycling rate for tinplate is 90.2%, and in the EU it stands at 84.9%. These values are not only impressive but also reflect the high practical suitability and widespread infrastructure for tinplate recycling. No other packaging metal can be kept so efficiently and permanently in the material cycle. Thus, tinplate remains the packaging material of choice when it comes to ecologically sensible and economically viable solutions, especially for chemical-technical goods.
Further Information and Reference
In Germany, two different recycling rates are published by the Federal Environment Agency (UBA): one according to the German Packaging Act and the other based on the EU Implementing Decision 2019/665. A video by ThyssenKrupp (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=47_DMfs3ZeM) clearly explains the differences in calculation methods for all common packaging types.
