WE RECYCLE:

• all aluminum beverage cans
• all steel or bimetal beverage or food cans

WE DO NOT RECYCLE:

• aerosol cans
• paint cans
• propane tanks

These items may be considered hazardous waste and should be disposed of properly. Questions of how and where to dispose of hazardous materials at UST should be directed to Colin Brownlow, Director of Environmental Health and Safety at (96)2-6533.

HOW & WHERE TO RECYCLE:

• all liquid should be drained and food residue removed from cans before recycling.
• labels do not have to be removed from food cans
• aluminum & metal cans should be put in campus recycling containers marked "cans" or brought to the Recycling Center at the Physical Plant.

WE RECYCLE SEPARATELY:

• clean aluminum foil, aluminum pie plates/food trays, pots & pans, lawn furniture, window & door frames, & other clean aluminum products
• copper
• brass
• silver
• sheet iron
• steel
• irony aluminum
• insulated copper wire
• other metals

These alloys are different than the alloy used in "tin" cans, but they are recyclable! If you need to schedule a pick up of such items, please call Bob Douglas, the Recycling Coordinator at 962-6388.

FACTS ABOUT CANS, aluminum & other metal recycling:

• According to the EPA, recycling just 1 ton of aluminum cans rather than throwing them away conserves more than 207 million BTUs, the equivalent of 36 barrels of oil or 1,655 gallons of gasoline.
• Recycling steel and tin cans saves between 60 and 74 percent of the energy used to produce them from raw materials. Recycling one aluminum beverage can saves enough energy to run a 100 watt bulb for 20 hours, a computer for 3 hours, or a TV for 2 hours. from EPA WasteWise
• To produce a ton of aluminum from scratch requires five tons of bauxite and 16,000 kilowatt-hours of electricity.  With recycling, you need a ton of old cans and just 750 kilowatt-hours of electricity.

• "Recycling scrap is cost-effective, and working with clean recycled steel in electric arc furnaces, instead of virgin ore in blast furnaces, requires a third as much energy (because it avoids mining, processing, transporting, and converting ore to iron), cuts air pollution by more than 85 percent (because all that digging, transporting, and transforming produces large amounts of greenhouse gases), and cuts water usage by 40 percent (because iron ore isn’t being cleaned and cooled)."  -Elizabeth Royte, Garbage Land, New York: Little, Brown and Company, 2005

• "…every ton of steel that is recycled saves 2,500 pounds of iron ore, 1,400 pounds of coal, and 120 pounds of limestone—the amount of materials it would take to mine and refine new steel.  Over the course of one year, the steel recycling industry conserves enough energy to power about eighteen million homes for twelve months.  All that, and recycling reduces landfilling and incineration, too.  Recycling aluminum also generates huge savings: it takes five million tons of bauxite ore, and the energy equivalent of thirty-two million barrels of crude oil, to produce a million tons of beer or soda cans.  Make new cans from the old ones, however, and all that bauxite, plus significant amounts of petroleum, coke, soda, ash, pitch, and lime, stays in the ground.  By averting the transformation of these materials into new aluminum, recycling cuts energy use by more than 94 percent and avoids the same amount of air pollution." -Elizabeth Royte, Garbage Land, New York: Little, Brown and Company, 2005
• In 1974, 22.7 cans equaled a pound of aluminum. By 1995, it increased to 32 cans per pound. In 1997, according to figures released by the Aluminum Association, the Can Manufacturers Institute, and the Institute of Scrap
  Recycling Industries, 32.57 cans are now made from one pound of aluminum. Lighter cans!
• Americans trash about half of the over 100 billion container cans they purchase each year.  In 2002, 51.6 billion used aluminum beverage cans (UBCs) were landfilled or littered (140 million every day), and the recycling rate for cans sunk to its lowest point since 1980. In April, the Aluminum Association, a Washington-based industry trade group, announced that the year 2002 UBC recycling rate was 53.4%. However, when the data are adjusted for the 5.3 billion imported scrap cans that were not originally sold in the United States, the actual domestic UBC recycling rate was 48.4%--lower than the 2001 rate of 49.2%. -from reports published by the Container Recycling Institute
• The Institute of Scrap Recycling Industry, the Aluminum Association and the Can Manufacturers Institute jointly have announced recovery levels for used beverage containers for last year. According to the three associations, the UBC recycling rate reached 54.2 percent last year [2008], a record level for the container. [dubious claim; see reports below -rjd] Report from Recycling Today, 12 Aug 2009
• The Aluminum Association, the Can Manufacturers Institute (CMI) and the Institute of Scrap Recycling Industries (ISRI) has released statistics indicating that Americans and can recycling industries recycled 51.5 billion aluminum cans in 2004, for a beverage can recycling rate of 51.2 percent. This reflects a 1.2 percent increase from the 2003 rate and the first increase since 1997
• The U.S. is going from a world leader in used beverage can (UBC) recycling to an also-ran. The U.S. 2001 55.4 percent UBC recycling rate places it well behind neighboring Canada (70 percent) and distantly trailing Brazil with its 85 percent rate. Report from Recycling Today, 25 Sep 02
• The recycling of aluminum beverage containers declined in 2001 with a recycling rate of 55.4 percent.  According to the Aluminum Association about 55.6 billion used beverage containers (UBCs) were recycled in the U.S. last year, a decline of more than 11 per cent from the recycling level in 2000.  It was the first time in a decade that the rate has dipped below 60%.
• Brazil recycled 89 percent of all aluminum cans sold in the country in 2003, maintaining the world record in aluminum can recycling for the third consecutive year among those countries where can recycling is voluntary. The 89-percent recycling rate corresponds to a volume of 112,000 metric tons of aluminum, or 8.2 billion cans, according to data compiled by Brazilian aluminum association Associação Brasiliera do Alumínio (Abal) and Brazilian canmakers' association Associação Brasileira dos Fabricantes de Latas de Alta Reciclabilidade.  -from the Aluminum Association May '05
• Aluminum cans are relatively new to Brazil. They were introduced only in 1990, when the Skol brewery began using them to provide a smaller, more convenient alternative to the traditional 600-milliliters (22-ounce), glass bottles. Since then, the market for aluminum cans has grown more than 3,000 percent, and recycling them has become a $110 million a year industry that employs an estimated 150,000 people, the aluminum association says. –from "Brazil poised to join top ranks of can recyclers, CNN.com, 3 Jan 2001
• The average aluminum can contains more than 50 percent post-consumer recycled content.
• The aluminum beverage can returns to the grocer's shelf as a new, filled can in as little as 90 days after collection, remelting, rolling, manufacturing, and distributing. A consumer could purchase the same basic recycled can every 13 weeks or 4 times a year.
• Tin cans are actually 99% steel with a thin layer of tin added to prevent rusting.
• Every day Americans use enough steel and tin cans to make a steel pipe running from Los Angeles to New York... and back!
• Steel cans package 97% of canned food on the market.
• There are more than 70 end markets for steel cans, recycling more than 104 pounds of steel cans per second according to the Steel Recycling Institute's 1997 figures.
• According to the Institute of Scrap Recycling Industries, 43% of the copper, 32% of the aluminum, 55% of the lead, and 19% of the zinc needed as raw materials in the U.S. are supplied by "scrap" recycling.
• The U.S. is the world's largest exporter of scrap metal. There are about 12,000 auto dismantlers and 250 shredders in the country. Virtually every automobile and three of four appliances are recycled. Much of our steel scrap has been shipped overseas for steel smelters in countries such as Japan and Turkey. According to Recycling Today, the trend is changing. The dearth of gondola rail cars has made off shore scrap shipping more economically attractive, but the railroads understand their loss of business and are moving to remedy the situation. There is also increasing demand from scrap processors in the Midwest/Great Lakes and Northeast regions to high tonnage mini-mills in the south.
• The St. Thomas Recycling Center uses a magnetic conveyer belt to separate aluminum cans from steel ones. The aluminum cans are crushed in a crusher so more cans can be stored between deliveries to the processor.

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