Ardagh, Crown Holdings fund aluminum can capture grants

Ardagh Metal Packaging, a beverage can manufacturer headquartered in Luxembourg, and Crown Holdings, a beverage can manufacturer based in Philadelphia, have partnered to fund a new grant opportunity as part of their continuing support of activities to spur the installation of aluminum can capture equipment in material recovery facilities (MRFs).

According to a news release from the Washington-based Can Manufacturers Institute (CMI), The Recycling Partnership (TRP), Washington, is collaborating with CMI to present these new grants.

CMI tells Recycling Today it cannot publicly share the exact amount of funding available from Ardagh and Crown Holdings. Grants will be awarded on a rolling basis, as TRP works with prospective grant recipients to understand their project timelines. TRP issues the grants at the time they are needed to catalyze the investment and upgrades.

CMI adds that the number of grants awarded depends on the level of funding that is provided in each grant, and says the goal of each grant is to provide funding that unlocks other sources of capital and results in a can capture equipment investment that otherwise would not be able to happen at that time.

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“Capturing each aluminum beverage can at MRFs is important since metal recycles forever and used beverage cans (UBC) are consistently one of the most valuable materials in the recycling stream,” says John Rost, Crown’s vice president of global sustainability and regulatory affairs.

According to CMI, this new grant opportunity builds on the five grants that Ardagh and Crown funded in 2021. Facilitated by CMI, those grants were awarded to Gel Recycling, Orange City, Florida, to install equipment to detect and capture errant aluminum cans that were missorted into the plastic stream; Independent Texas Recyclers in Houston to install equipment to capture aluminum that was not detected by the main aluminum sorting equipment; Rivers Recycling in Kilgore, Texas, to install equipment to move from hand sortation to an automated process; Curbside Management in Asheville, North Carolina, to invest in an eddy current separator; and the MRF jointly owned by the city of Milwaukee and Waukesha County, Wisconsin, to invest in an eddy current separator.

CMI says the five grants given in 2021 were expected to capture 71 million aluminum beverage cans per year, generating about $1 million in revenue for the U.S. recycling system. CMI reports those five grantees have managed to recover 140 million aluminum beverage cans per year as a result of the investment, higher than what CMI anticipated.

“Ardagh and Crown are generously funding recycling system improvements with significant environmental and economic impacts,” says Scott Breen, CMI’s vice president of sustainability. “CMI’s can recycling impact calculator shows when the nearly 140 million aluminum beverage cans are captured and recycled each year due to the improvements from these grants, the annual impacts are more than $2 million generated for the recycling system.”

In addition, Ardagh and Crown financed the development of tools to catalyze additional can capture equipment installation. In 2022, CMI made available a complimentary return-on-investment (ROI) calculator, developed by Ann Arbor-based Resource Recycling Systems, that any MRF can use to see the ROI of putting in additional can-capture equipment.

“Ardagh is proud to join Crown and continue investing in can sorting efficiencies at MRFs to strengthen aluminum beverage can recycling,” says Jennifer Cumbee, Ardagh’s chief sustainability officer, global metal. “These investments reflect our industry commitment to increase beverage can recycle rates as CMI detailed in our Aluminum Beverage Can Recycling Primer and Roadmap. The objectives and tactics are clear as CMI aluminum beverage can sector members are aligned in improving from a 45 percent aluminum beverage can recycling rate in 2020, which makes it the most recycled beverage container in the United States, to new heights of 70 percent by 2030, 80 percent by 2040 and 90 percent by 2050.”