The German market research firm Gesellschaft für Verpackungsmarktforschung mbH reports that tinplate recycling in the country stands at 93.6 percent, topping the previous year’s figure by 2 percent.
Rasselstein, Germany’s only tin producer, added that the proportion of recoverable tinplate packages from private households increased by 2.9 percent to 95.8 percent in 2008. For the 2008, German consumption of tinplate stands at slightly less than 500,000 tons of packaging steel. Compared with 2007, the tonnage of tinplate recovered from household waste rose by 11,300 to 412,000 tons.
The two companies most responsible for the steady increase in tin recycling are DWR Deutsche Gesellschaft für Weißblechrecycling mbH and Kreislaufsystem Blechverpackungen Stahl GmbH. Along with these companies, Rasselstein collects used packages from household and commercial waste and returns them to the steel producing industry as valuable secondary raw materials. Considering that recycling has now come close to one-hundred percent for packaging steel, the companies are mainly concentrating on improving the quality still further.
“We arrange for the material to be pretreated effectively to decontaminate containers of chemical products before they are fed back into the steel production process,” says Klaus Neuhaus-Wever, KBS’ managing partner.
With the shredding of tinplate from household and similar uses, introduced in 2007, DWR is following the same goal: “By using these cutting techniques, we can efficiently separate packaging steel from product residues and other contaminants resulting from use in a household environment,” says managing director Edmund van Dyck, explaining the DWR approach. “This way, we have reduced the proportion of foreign substances in tinplate scrap by another 90 percent compared to untreated fractions.”