Leicestershire residents encouraged to recycle their metal packaging

A new campaign promoting metal packaging recycling has been introduced by Leicestershire County Council. In a bid to improve recycling rates, households across the county are being encouraged to recycle their metal packaging including food and drink cans, aluminium wrapping foil and foil trays, as well as empty aerosols and metal screw tops.

Spearheaded by the Aluminium Packaging Recycling Organisation (Alupro), the ‘MetalMatters’ programme will use targeted social media and digital messaging to communicate the widespread benefits of recycling metal household packaging. 

Starting in January, it is hoped that within the six-week long campaign, Leicestershire County Council can engage with the majority of the 316,000 households in Leicestershire. Since its launch in 2012, more than 128 local authorities have adopted MetalMatters, with recycling rates improving as a result.

Councillor Blake Pain, lead member for environment and the green agenda at Leicestershire County Council said: “We know that the vast majority of people here in Leicestershire are great at recycling, but together we can all make the effort to do more.

“MetalMatters allows us to engage with our residents and encourage them to think about their recycling habits and understand how best to correctly recycle their household metal packaging such as food and drink cans, foil trays, kitchen foil, empty aerosols, and metal bottle tops and jar lids.

“When we consider that for every recycled aluminium can we save enough energy to run a TV for four hours, we can all make a huge difference by recycling as much of our waste as possible.” 

Tom Giddings, executive director of Alupro, added: “For more than a decade, our MetalMatters programme has been educating the public about the benefits and importance of recycling metal packaging. We’re confident that the introduction of this campaign will help to drive an increase in recycling rates and households taking positive action across Leicestershire.

“For us, the most important message is that metal is infinitely recyclable, meaning the quality and properties of the metal will be unchanged during the recycling process. Making a few small changes can add up to a big environmental impact.”

Funded by the metal packaging industry, MetalMatters aims to educate householders about the benefits of metal packaging and encourage them to recycle. Designed to support recycling schemes, MetalMatters can be run by any local authority, either region-wide, by collection round or even by demographic targeting.