Environment

David, a school boy from Shifnal, wondered what happened to his recycling once it left his home. We decided to find out... So one day David opened a can of cola, drank the contents, washed it out and put it in the recycling bin alongside the other tins and bottles - "Follow the can", he said.

At the Bridgnorth recycling depot

It's not long before the Bridgnorth kerbside collectors arrive to pick up David's can. When the truck is full they head over to the recycling depot in Stanley Lane where the bottles, cans and paper are off-loaded into bays. 

It's over to Pete Jones now who regards the depot as his baby! Using his tractor he smashes the bottles and squashes the cans and scoops everything into skips ready for the next leg of the journey. 

Now David's cola can heads to a scrap yard six miles down the road in Broseley. All the cans are taken to Oakley Arnold's to be separated out. The cans are tipped into a hopper, a powerful magnet pulls the steel cans into one section and the aluminium cans get spat out into another. They're then squashed and baled into cubes.

In the furnace

Leaving Shropshire

So far David's cola can has stayed in Shropshire, but now it's heading over the border. The scrap yard takes the aluminium cans to Alutrade in West Bromwich where they're stockpiled until a lorry load is ready for the trip to Warrington.

An hour or so up the M6 in Warrington, on the banks of the Manchester Ship Canal, is a huge aluminium can recycling factory. The Novelis plant melts down around 22 million cans a day!

The process has four stages: The cans are shredded into little pieces; extremely hot air is blown into the fragments to vapourise the ink and labelling; the aluminium is melted down in huge furnaces; and finally it's moulded into massive ingots. It takes 1.5 million cans to make one ingot!

The huge roll of aluminium

Germany

David's can is now part of an ingot which is shipped from Warrington to a German rolling mill. There it's transformed into 17 km of aluminium sheet, like an enormous roll of aluminium foil! 

A lot of it is then brought back to can factories in Britain and one of the biggest is in Wrexham. Could David's star can have made it there?

The Ball Packaging can factory is extremely noisy - no wonder given that they produce six million cans a day. Earplugs all round as discs are stamped out of the aluminium sheet and punched into shape. Here's an interesting fact - the wall of an aluminium can is thinner than a human hair!

Cans on the production line

So David's can has travelled from his home in Shifnal and could well have ended up as another can in Wrexham. By now it could be on a Shropshire supermarket shelf and, who knows, it could even have become another cola can that David is drinking from in his kitchen...

Top Tips

Wash your cans. Ade Holford is a kerbside collector in Bridgnorth and suggests that it can be a dirty business: "If people can wash the cans out that makes a hell of a difference, cos in the summer we get maggots."

Crush cans. It means that they take up less room and recyclers can take more per lorry load.

Put the right cans, bottles, etc in the right bins at recycling centres. Roger Oakley at the Broseley scrap yard is constantly amazed by the bits of metal and other rubbish that make it into can recycling bins.