When you recycle your cans at AAA Recycling Centre you are doing much more than getting a cash refund and keeping South Australia looking beautiful.

Aluminium is 100% recyclable and experiences no loss of properties or quality during the recycling process. Recycling aluminium also uses only 5% of the energy used to create new aluminium and emits only 5% of the greenhouse gases. It is for these reasons that approximately 75% of the aluminium ever produced is still in use today.

Aluminium is a valuable resource which can be recycled indefinitely with no waste. One tonne of recycled scrap aluminium will make one tonne of new aluminium.

PLEASE NOTE: It is illegal to return beverage containers sold outside of South Australia for a refund.

We really appreciate it if the cans are not crushed when they are brought in for recycling, it makes reading the labels difficult for refunds and crushed cans often have sharp edges which can cause injury to our staff.

If you’re in the Burton / Salisbury area of Adelaide’s Northern Suburbs and would like to recycle your cans for cash please call: (08) 8280 6350.

AAA Recycling Centre is one of Adelaide’s leading can recycling facilities. Every week we receive thousands of cans that qualify for the South Australian government’s container deposit refund scheme.

How to tell if a can is part of the deposit refund scheme

Under South Australia’s container deposit legislation cans marked with either:

–  10c refund at collection depots when sold in SA or
– 10c refund at SA/NT collection depots in State/Territory of purchase

can be returned to AAA Recycling Centre to collect a 10 cent refund for each aluminium can.

• Customers recycle empty cans at AAA Recycling Centre
• The aluminium cans are then bailed and sent to a reprocessing plant
• Where they are sorted and cleaned ready for reprocessing
• The cans are heated to 500°C and turned into molten aluminium (this process removes any coatings and inks that may be present)
• The molten aluminium is then made into large triangular ingots. (Each ingot contains approximately 1.6 million drinks cans)
• The ingots are sent to a rolling mill where they are rolled into sheets – this gives the aluminium strength and greater flexibility.
• Manufacturers use the rolled aluminium sheets to produce new aluminium cans.
• In little over a month, the cans delivered to AAA Recycling Centre are sent back to the shops ready to be used again.

Aluminium Recycling Graphic Courtesy of Alupro

Over 90% of the drink cans made and sold in the Australia are aluminium, but there’s more to aluminium packaging than just cans!

Aerosols, foil food trays, wrappers and bottle tops are also made of aluminium – there is an awful lot more that can be recycled.

The drinks can that you recycle with AAA Recycling Centre today could be made into a new can, filled and put back on the shelf in just 60 days. In one year, that can could be recycled six times, saving enough energy to make 160 new cans.

Recycling aluminium saves around 95% of the energy needed to make the metal from raw materials.

In addition to the energy savings, recycling aluminium saves around 95% of the greenhouse gas emissions compared to the ‘primary’ production process. Recycling 1 tonne of aluminium saves 9 tonnes of CO2 emissions; When you consider that 1 tonne of CO2 is equivalent to driving a car 2800 miles, the benefits of recycling really start to become clear.