Foil - A to Z of recycling

Recycle foil at your local Household Waste Recycling Centre or within your kerbside recycling collection.

Many foil items can be recycled, such as take-away trays, pie and quiche cases and oven-ready meal trays. Remember to clean foil before you recycle it. However, not all products that appear to be aluminium foil are recyclable. For example, some crisp packets can look like aluminium, but they are actually made from metallised plastic and cannot be recycled. Try the scrunch test to find out which one it is – if it stays scrunched it can be recycled.

Aluminium is the only packaging material where its value exceeds the costs of collection and processing at recycling centres. Other major factors in its favour are: recycling can be repeated many times without loss of quality; the energy required to produce recycled aluminium is only 5% of that required for primary production from bauxite.