Can you recycle aluminum cans?

Yes

Yes, and it is the most valuable thing in your cart. Empty it, leave it uncrushed, put it in loose. Not crushing is the one instruction worth changing a habit for: a flattened can stops looking like a container to the sorting equipment.

Follow it down the line

Three different questions hide inside "is this recyclable?", and the answer can change at each step.

The material · Yes

Is the material recyclable?

Nothing else in the bin comes close. Aluminum melts and reforms with no theoretical limit on the number of times, which is why around 75% of all the aluminum ever produced is still in use today, and making metal from recycled aluminum takes about 5% of the energy that making it from ore does. Cans also go back into cans rather than being downgraded into something lesser: the closed-loop circularity rate reached 96.7% in the Aluminum Association's December 2024 report, against roughly 34% for PET bottles. Which makes the recovery figure the uncomfortable part of this page. Only 43% of the cans shipped in the United States in 2023 were recycled, below the 52% average since 1990. Cans still beat glass at 39.6% and PET bottles at 20%, so the industry's claim to the most recycled drinks package holds. It is simply not the number the material deserves, and the gap is a collection problem rather than a materials one.

Sources: The Aluminum Association: recycling, The Aluminum Association: amid recycling rate decline, the aluminum can remains the most recycled drinks package

The facility · Yes

Will a sorting facility recover it?

This is the layer where a household habit measurably changes the outcome. Aluminum is the commodity that pays for the sort line: in 2019 used beverage cans represented 33% of potential revenue at facilities in states without a container deposit, and 12.5% in deposit states where the cans are skimmed off before they arrive, more than any other single material either way. Facilities want your cans badly enough to buy machinery specifically to catch them. What defeats that machinery is flattening. Sorting equipment separates largely by shape and size, and a flattened can stops presenting as a container: it gets carried along with the fiber or into the residue line. Eureka Recycling in Minneapolis was losing 3 to 5% of its fiber grades to flattened containers and fixed it with a scalping screen set at five to six inches plus a second eddy current, pulling aluminum at both the beginning and the end of the container line, which brought the loss below 2%. The pattern has repeated across the industry: a Republic Services facility in St. Louis added a second eddy current on its glass discharge line and recovered 15 tons of aluminum a month that had been going to landfill, and Rumpke in Cincinnati went on to add a third.

Sources: Resource Recycling: equipment upgrades drive greater UBC recovery, Can Manufacturers Institute: examples of MRFs that added aluminum can capture equipment

Your curbside program · Widely accepted

Will your curbside program take it?

Universal in practice, and the preparation is trivial. Cuyahoga County says all communities take metal food and beverage cans, aluminum cups included, wanting them empty, clean and dry, with straws pulled out and cans not nested inside one another. Napa gives the instruction that actually differs from what most people do, and gives the reason with it: cans go in the recycling cart, empty, and left uncrushed, because crushing makes them harder to sort. That is the facilities' own finding arriving at the kitchen counter as a household rule, and it is worth noticing that it contradicts the instinct to save space. In states with container deposits there is a second route that pays you back, and Napa points residents at a redemption center for it.

Sources: CuyahogaRecycles: cans, Napa Recycling: aluminum cans

What you need to do

Empty and dry. A rinse is plenty, it does not need washing
Leave it uncrushed, whatever the cart space argues
Take the straw out and bin it separately
Do not nest cans or tins inside one another

Where else it can go

Deposit redemption

Where a container deposit exists, taking cans back is the route that pays. You get the deposit, and the cans leave in a stream that was never mixed with anything else.

Only in deposit states, and only for containers that carry one.

Scrap yard, for cash

Aluminum is worth enough that scrap dealers buy it by weight from the public. Cuyahoga County tells residents outright that cans can be turned in for cash locally.

Worth the trip only if you have accumulated a real quantity. A week of cans is not a payday.

A can drive

Charity collections exist precisely because the material has resale value. In northeast Ohio some fire stations collect cans for the Aluminum Cans for Burned Children program, and Habitat for Humanity stores in the county host drop-offs.

Local by nature. The specific programs named here are Ohio ones; the pattern is common, the collectors are not the same everywhere.

Common mistakes

Crushing cans to save space, which is the most common way a perfectly good can gets lost at the facility
Nesting cans inside each other, which makes two items look like one to the sorters
Leaving the straw in the can
Reading 'most recycled beverage container' as 'most cans get recycled'. Both are true of a 43% rate
Binning cans in a deposit state, where they are literally worth money at a redemption center