AA Waste is a UK based company which provides a UK national collection and recycling service for aluminium every year for companies across England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland.
AA Waste prefer to use recycling routes over landfill. Therefore, along with our business partners, we use recycling routes to deal with aluminium.
Aluminium extraction, production and manufacturing use masses of energy and a lot of additional materials are discarded whilst mining aluminium. Aluminium is a plentiful resource that forms about eight per cent of the earth's crust. It is mined and extracted from bauxite, which contains the compound alumina, in an energy-intensive electrolytic process. Four tons of bauxite contains two tons of alumina, which yields one ton of valuable aluminium. The metal is used in buildings, transport and other industrial applications, as well as packaging.
Aluminium is the most cost-effective material to recycle, because of the huge energy savings of up to ninety five per cent. For this reason, recycling is part of the normal lifecycle for large industrial products. All the scraps left over from the aluminium production process along with our used products can be melted down and used over and over again. Surprisingly around seventy five per cent of all the aluminium ever made is still in circulation.
Recycling aluminium is one of the best things we can do for our environment. The UK has an aluminium can recycling plant which turns used aluminium cans into slabs of aluminium which are exactly the right specification for making new cans.
AA Waste will collect your aluminium cans, aluminium foil and washed aluminium ready food trays. The consignment will be taken to a licenced transfer station. The transfer station will then forward the consignment along with other consignments in bulk to the recycling centre where the aluminium cans are segregated from the other items. The cans are then shredded, removing any coloured coating. The shredded aluminium is then melted in a huge furnace. The molten metal is then poured into ingot casts to set. The ingots can then be made into 1.5m cans. The aluminium foil and washed ready meal trays are made of a slightly different alloy, therefore they are recycled with other aluminium scraps to make cast items such as engine components, where it makes a big contribution to making vehicles lighter and more energy efficient.
