Powys County Council has launched its ‘Make Your Metals Matter’ campaign, targeting all 67,000 households in the county.

The campaign will include recycling roadshows, leaflets being sent to homes, adverts in newspapers, council vehicles carrying recycling messages and banners at recycling centres and a social media campaign.

The council are reminding residents to recycle all of the metal packaging found around their home, including food and drink cans, foil trays, empty aerosols, metal screw tops from glass bottles and jars and aluminium foil used for baking or wrapping leftovers

If all of the metal packaging used in Powys’ homes each year was collected for recycling it would save around 2,150 tonnes of carbon dioxide, the equivalent to taking 458 cars off local streets for a year.

Used metal packaging can be recycled into new products at a far lower cost to the environment than making them from raw materials.

Making drinks cans from recycled material saves up to 95% of the energy and greenhouse gas emissions needed to make both aluminium and steel from raw materials. What’s more, every time metal passes through the recycling loop the benefits are repeated, again and again and again!

Cllr Phyl Davies, Powys County Council’s Cabinet Member for Recycling and Waste, said: “Powys residents are already committed to recycling and reducing waste which is great news. We want to encourage our residents to think about metal packaging found throughout their home, not just in the kitchen but in the bathroom, and bedroom.

“Food and drink cans, foil and empty aerosols are all easily and endlessly recyclable. Don’t forget every can recycled saves enough energy to run a TV for four hours – so a small action like putting your empty bean tin into your red recycling box can make a big difference.”

The Powys campaign is being jointly funded by MetalMatters, an industry partnership comprising the UK’s leading producers, users and recyclers of metal packaging and Powys council.

The MetalMatters programme is managed by the Aluminium Packaging Recycling Organisation (Alupro) on behalf of the funding partners.