Can I Recycle Tea Tins, Coffee Cans and Cookie Tins?
Can I Recycle Tea Tins, Coffee Cans and Cookie Tins?
Many readers ask “Can I recycle tea tins?” “Can I recycle popcorn cans?” “Can I recycle cookie tins?” “Can I recycle olive oil cans?” The types of metal cans that tea, coffee, biscuits, cookies, flavored popcorn, olive oil and other food products come in are usually made of steel (if a magnet sticks to it, it’s steel). Steel is the same material that soup cans and other types of canned food are made from, so it seems like they should be recyclable, but are they?
They’re not the same as soup cans
Steel cans and metal food tins are definitely recyclable, but whether or not you should put them in your curbside recycling pickup depends on your community and whether you do single stream recycling (all materials are placed in one bin rather than separated by type of material). Some recycling programs will accept these kinds of metal containers mixed in with the paper, plastic and other cans, but some do not.
My solid waste district asks us not to put these in our curbside recycling even though steel soup cans are okay. Check with your city or county recycling program or solid waste district, yours may be more lenient about the types of metal containers they will allow.
Regardless of whether or not these are acceptable in your curbside bin, or if you are unsure about the rules in your community, you can always take them to a metals recycling center, or many communities have a drop-off for scrap metals recycling.
Related: Can I Recycle Aluminum Foil?
Why won’t my community recycling take food tins?
Honestly, I have been trying to get an answer on this from my contacts at the county solid waste district, and they can only tell me that the Materials Recovery Facilities here (i.e. the recycling sorting centers), do not want these types of cans mixed in with our recycling. It could be that the coating on them or their shape causes them not to be sorted properly, or maybe they aren’t as valuable as plain steel soup cans and the like. We don’t know. (If someone from a MRF has a more concrete answers on this, please feel free to contact me. I like to be able to share the reasons behind the recycling policies whenever I can.)
What to do with used tea tins, coffee cans and cookie tins
These types of cans can be great for reuse projects, planters, pencil holders and so on. Here are some fun and creative reuse ideas for tea tins.
Still, there’s a limit to how many pencil holders and planters one household needs. So I keep a box for recycling scrap metals that I usually toss these into along with clean aluminum foil. When it gets filled up, I can take it to my city’s recycling drop off center where they will take scrap metals for recycling, or a local scrap metal recycler and get a little cash for it!
Did you know?
– Steel Recycling Institute
Steel is the most recycled material on the planet, more than all other materials combined. Steel retains an extremely high overall recycling rate, which in 2014, stood at 86 percent.
Related: Recycling at a Materials Recovery Facility – How Does It Work?
You make a great point, and that is that there is no real standard, and in various points around the country, recycling is different. It’s sad actually. In some areas, they don’t even accept paper for recycling! While I’m not overly familiar with tins and recycling, although I’m learning quickly, I believe it has something to do with lined vs unlined.
KEEP BLOGGING…. and keep talking recycling and the environment!!
Thanks for your comment, Tom! Yes, it’s confusing. All we can do is do our best to try to make sense of the rules and spread the word.
When I open up your RSS feed it gives me a bunch of garbled text, is the malfunction on my side?
Hi there, if you click on the RSS feed link, it will show you a bunch of code, but if you take the link (https://greenandgrumpy.com/feed/) and enter it into your feed reader software, it should work, I just tested it. Let me know if you are still having trouble.
The “can” my coffee comes in is actually a hard cardboard tube with a metal bottom and metal top with a plastic lid. Looks like a can, but it’s not really a can. Can that be recycled?
Since it’s mixed materials, I’m going to say no. I think you could remove the metal bottom and recycle that with the rest of your metals, but the cardboard, if it’s lined with anything like a plastic or metallic coating (which most of them are) you’ll have to throw that out. Ditto with the plastic lid, unless your community recycling accepts those types of plastics, but most don’t. I will do some more investigating on this and ask some of my contacts in recycling, but I think the metal bottom is probably the only thing you can recycle.
my neighborhood has stopped recycling glass, isn’t this where it all started?
Hi Laura, I’m not sure what you mean by where it all started, but I’m sorry to hear that your area isn’t taking glass anymore. Unfortunately, that seems to be the route of many communities: seriously limit what they will take, or eliminate recycling altogether. It’s a bad situation.
I no longer buy coffee in those cans that are mixed metal/cardboard. I kept the two I had, changed one to a decaf container. I fill they with coffee in bags I can recycle in my Terracycle box. I have had to replace the plastic snap on lids as they tend to crack over time. I pull endless items out of our condo recycle bins that shouldn’t be in there, including mixed metal/cardboard containers. Keep the lid, throw the other part in our trash compactor. And yes, recycling properly seems to be a full-time job.
The manufacturers and their packaging choices don’t make it easy on consumers to do the right thing.