Aluminium is a light, infinitely recyclable metal used for beverage cans, refillable bottles, aerosol and cosmetic tubes and foils. About 75 percent of all aluminium ever produced is still in use.
It replaces PET bottles, plastic tubes and pouches. But a can is not plastic-free: food and drink cans have a thin plastic lining on the inside, so the metal does not react with the food or drink. Global drinks-can recycling reached 75 percent in 2023, up from 71 percent in 2019, according to the International Aluminium Institute, the aluminium industry's trade body.
Per single use, aluminium does not automatically beat plastic: a 2023 life-cycle assessment (LCA) by the National Association for PET Container Resources (NAPCOR), the PET industry's trade body, found single-use PET ahead of both glass and aluminium, and a 2025 Environmental Research study found making one reusable aluminium bottle emits about 13.1 kg carbon dioxide equivalent (CO2e), against 0.28 kg for a reusable plastic (high-density polyethylene, HDPE) bottle. Making aluminium from ore takes a lot of energy. The same study found a reusable bottle used daily for a year vastly outperforms 730 single-use PET bottles (two half-litre bottles a day), so the payback comes through reuse, not the material itself.
Drawbacks: primary smelting is energy intensive unless recycled content is high; cans have a thin plastic lining, which was long made with bisphenol A (BPA), a hormone-disrupting chemical, and is now often made from other plastics; unit cost is higher than PET.