I’ve always wondered this do they sell it to another recycling company down the road? If cans are selling for $1 a pound how much profit do they make?
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Someone processes it, melts it down, and sells it as aluminum. They don’t sell as cans, but that’s what recycling is, melting it down, and turning it into something else aluminum.
The dollar figure you give seems quite high. I’m seeing 65 cents per pound as in the range for aluminum ingots. And the processing does cost a bit, so unless there’s a pretty steep subsidy, you’re not going to get paid more than that for your scrap.
The can recyclers sells them to a scrap yard who buys cans from all the other recyclers in the city/region. The scrap yard them shreds the cans and sells them to a foundry that melts them into aluminum ingots. The ingots are sold to factories that then melt the aluminum and make aluminum products (thin sheets, thicker plates, and blocks that can be machined into things like extruded window frames, etc.).
When you buy a can of soda, you pay the price plus a deposit for the can. When you return the empty can you get the deposit back. Since most people didn’t recycle on their own, they make you pay a deposit as an incentive to recycle to get your money back. A lot of people still don’t recycle. People still throw away cans but they aren’t throwing away the deposit, the state already has the money. The recycling companies get reimbursed by the state but the state is making millions of free money when the cans aren’t returned.
I learned this when I collected cans at an an airport. I went to recycle them and was told They don’t take out of state cans. Nobody will take them because the recyclers get reimbursed by the state. Since I couldn’t do anything with the cans, I asked if they wanted them. Again they said no, nobody will take them. I ended up throwing them away. If they were really concerned about recycling, they would have taken the cans.
[Can recycling.](https://www.aluminum.org/sites/default/files/2021-09/CanRecyclingManifesto_0.pdf) “45 billion aluminum beverage cans are recycled each year in
the United States, a near equal amount goes to landfills.”
The ultimate destination of your recycled cans is a giant machine that eats dirty, randomly-shaped aluminum, melts it down, and spits out clean aluminum in shapes that factories like.
Your local recycling facility probably does *not* have one of these melty machines. And the places that *do* have one of these melty machines probably do not want to deal with your loose cans. Running the melty machine is only worth it if they can do it in *biiig* batches, so they want *biiig* bales of the stuff.
Your local recycling facility is most likely a company that has crushing machines that can eat random scrap cans and spit out the bales that the melty machine company actually wants. So they buy your loose cans, crush them up into bales, and sell the bales. That’s what they are actually in the business of: dealing with your loose crap, and turning it into something the *actual* recyclers can handle. So they can buy your loose cans at, say, $1 a pound, turn them into bales, and sell the bales for, I dunno, $1.10, and pocket the difference. The baling process alone adds value, and they are creating that value.
There will always be exceptions. Some recyclers will take the loose stuff and do the whole baling and melting process themselves. But in general, it’s most advantageous to let small independent operators located closer to the people bringing in the loose stuff do the baling separately. That way, the compacted bales can be shipped to the centralized melting place more efficiently, as the bales take up less room, and tend to be less finicky to handle than a bunch of oddly-shaped loose bits.
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