Recently we made a short LinkedIn post extolling the virtues of recycled aluminium foil packaging. There are many compelling arguments to suggest aluminium is a sustainable packaging panacea, but a 19th century English economist may have a disagreement with that.  

What’s so good about recycled aluminium?

Aluminium is endlessly recyclable, it doesn’t degrade during the recycling process, and the process uses 95% less energy than the creation of virgin aluminium. It’s also extremely easy to sort, and as a result, almost 75% of all aluminium ever produced is still in use today. Presently 80% of aluminium products in the US are made from recycled aluminium and the amount of recycled aluminium used is trending upwards.

Compare this to plastic which degrades in quality when recycled and is difficult to sort. According to the national geographic, only 9% of all plastics ever made has being recycled. For packaging it seems obvious to use aluminium over plastic.

Recycled Aluminium vs Virgin Aluminium

Aluminium is easy to sort from other materials which makes its recycling process is easy to automate, and as we’ve said before, you should automate everything.

An assortment of materials is submerged into a mixture of water and iron powder. Aluminium has the lowest density of common construction metals and therefore is the only metal that will float in this mixture. Once the floating materials are skimmed from the top, the aluminium can be further separated from non-metallic materials using a magnetic field (while not ferromagnetic, aluminium is still paramagnetic).

The aluminium is washed during these two processes so can be immediately melted down to be reused.

Virgin aluminium on the other hand is a very costly process to produce with huge environmental impact.

Aluminium is the most abundant material on the planet but is only found in minerals. Most aluminium we use comes from the mineral bauxite, and 5 tonnes of bauxite is needed to produce 1 tonne of aluminium. Bauxite itself is acquired via open-pit mining, the mining process that has the highest potential mining threats to the environment due to its effects on air and water chemistry in the local area.

To create aluminium, bauxite must first undergo the Bayer process to create alumina. This process produces waste called “Red Mud.” Red mud must be stored due to its high alkalinity and discharges of red mud have caused a few environmental disasters in the past.

Alumina is then made into aluminium via an electrolysis process called Reduction which requires a tremendous amount of electricity to accomplish and produces Perfluorocarbons, which are greenhouse gasses.

If we can recycle all our aluminium then the need for new virgin aluminium should decrease and we can scale back on the environmentally damaging processes used to make virgin aluminium. Intuitively, this should be the end of the argument: we can endlessly recycle all our aluminium packaging, making it the most sustainable and environmentally friendly. This would be naive.

Jevons Paradox

In his 1865 book “The Coal Question”, economist William Stanley Jevons observed that consumption of coal increased with the introduction of the Watt steam engine.

Watt’s new steam engine greatly improved the efficiency of the coal steam engine and people assumed that as coal became a more efficient to use then people would use less of it.

Per application, the amount of coal used did decrease, but as coal became a more cost-effective power source, more industries started adopting coal as their power source and overall coal consumption increased.

What Jevons observed was an increase in consumption as a result from actions to increase efficiency and reduce consumer costs. We call this observation the “Jevons Paradox,” and a great example of this can be seen in the efficiency of cars.

As cars engines and their fuels have become more efficient, the assumption would be that demand for fuel would decrease. Instead, people drive more often or further than they would have previously at equal cost, directly increasing the demand for fuel. As shown in the image below, even if people don’t drive more, they may spend their savings on fuel to instead go on holiday abroad which indirectly increases the demand for fuel.

 Anyone attempting to improve sustainability should keep Jevons Paradox in mind, and the case of aluminium is no exception.

If we decide to make recycled aluminium the panacea for packaging materials because of its obvious benefits, we will further increase the demand for recycled aluminium. As recycled aluminium cannot be created without first the creation of virgin aluminium, then the increase in demand for recycled aluminium will result in an increase in demand for virgin aluminium. We should also consider the replacement of the aluminium lost over time (75% of aluminium still in use today implies 25% has ended up in a landfill or the ocean somewhere).

In attempting to improve packaging sustainability, we may end up doing even more environmental damage and produce more pollution than we would have otherwise.

Also consider the increase cost of transporting material that comes with using aluminium. While light for a metal, aluminium is much denser than plastic, and is much heavier when transporting at higher volumes than plastic packaging or products packaged in plastic.

Packaging must compete with the demand for recycled aluminium in other products, although packaging has the largest responsibility to recycle given the prevalence of single use. This means that the possibility for indirect increases in demand for aluminium could occur outside of the packaging industry that would but would still affect it.

Evoking the paradox

The reality much more complex than this blog post has let on so far, and it is difficult to say if Jevons paradox will rear its head with a wide adoption of recycled aluminium.

As of 2019, the mass adoption of recycled aluminium was beginning to take place. Apple stated that aluminium accounted for a quarter of the company’s carbon footprint and wanted to move to use 100% recycled aluminium in their products. They claim that by switching to recycled aluminium that they have reduced their emissions by 46%. Drinks companies such as Coca-Cola and Pepsi have also made commitments to recycled aluminium in their product packaging too.

In 2022, the world economic forum claimed the demand for aluminium is increasing, with the US consumption of aluminium in 2021 being 4.3 million metric tonnes, vs 3.98 million in 2020, and that global demand for aluminium will grow by 80% by 2050. While the WEF say aluminium only makes up 1% of the waste stream in the US, 7 million metric tonnes are not recycled worldwide.

It’s not possible to say if an increase in consumerism is the driving factor for the increase demand of aluminium, or if it is due to a commitment to recycled aluminium and we’re beginning to see a Jevons Paradox trap occur, but both causes are likely contributing factors.

Regarding the worldwide figure for recycling, 7 million tonnes is staggering when you consider it is nearly double the amount consumed by the US over the same time. For a mass adoption of recycled aluminium to be successful, more effort should be made to recycle. As a positive, recycling rates for aluminium are increasing, with the UK recycling 52% of its aluminium in 2018 vs 41% in 2010 with the biggest change in drinks cans, of which 75% were recycled in 2019.

This data is mainly focused on aluminium as a monolith and isn’t focused solely on packaging, but there are a few roadblocks that could prevent further wide adoption of recycled aluminium in packaging.

While drink cans have a longer shelf life than plastic packaged drinks, plastic bottles can hold more liquid with less packaging, consider how impractical a two litre can of pop might be. And as previously mentioned, aluminium is much denser than plastic. The increased in shipping costs and emissions could prevent companies from adopting recycled aluminium over lighter plastic.

On the topic of drinks, despite the effort of drinks manufacturers have made to move over to recycled aluminium, products packaged in cans, typically fizzy drinks, are becoming less in demand as society becomes more health conscious. The reusability of water bottles seems to be hampering moves from drinks companies attempting to repackage water in cans. This could offset the demand for recycled aluminium in other types of packaging.

The one area where recycled aluminium may fall for a Jevons paradox trap is in packaging for food in the style of trays. Aluminium foil trays will protect food as well as plastic alternatives and have the added benefit of keeping out light without having a colouring added to the material.

COVID lockdowns saw a drastic increase in the purchase of ready meals, and the habits formed over lockdowns haven’t gone away with the prediction of the market to grow by 5.1% every year until at least 2030. A wide adoption of recycled aluminium into these products could likely see an increase in demand for virgin aluminium to compensate if the demand is not offset elsewhere.

Should we be adopting recycled aluminium?

As you may have realised reading through this blog post and the various links provided, the answer is yes*, with a very complicated asterisk. It seems that a Jevons paradox response to mass adopting recycled aluminium could occur, and result in an increase demand for virgin aluminium, which would be antithetical to our aim of polluting less and being more sustainable. However, the markets as they exist now are too complicated and are changing too quickly to provide us with an obvious answer. While we could increase demand for aluminium further, human behaviour trends seem to offset that. Recycling of aluminium is on the uptake, and health-conscious trends are already reducing the demand for aluminium in the drinks packaging market.

While not a sustainable panacea for the packaging industry, sensible application for recycled aluminium, and an increase in awareness of recycling should help us avoid evoking the Jevons paradox.

Do you use foil packaging and need support automating handling of foil trays on a production line? Partners in Packaging can help you with our range of tray denesters that can pick and place foil trays as well as plastic and card alternatives, even on the same machine. Please contact sales@partnersinpackaging.com for any inquiries.