Bottle to bottles: Can to cans

When Dansk Retursystem A/S sends consumers' empty bottles and cans for recycling, quality is the driving force. By putting special emphasis on the quality of our sorting of empty bottles and cans we have been able, despite the current crisis affecting the reprocessing companies, to sign new contracts which ensure the most environmentally friendly form of recycling

Used bottles and cans become new bottles and cans. It's as simple as that. For many years, the glass bottles collected by Dansk Retursystem A/S have been forwarded to a reprocessing company which smelts them into new bottles. This year, following a concerted effort to make the quality of our sorting even better, we have been fortunate to establish an equivalent 'closed-loop' system for plastic bottles and cans.

A never-ending cycle
When used packaging is turned into new material, we're helping to ensure that the material enters a sort of never-ending cycle, where it ends up being used over and over again. The packaging returned by customers therefore functions as a source of raw materials for the production of new bottles and cans. This makes perfect sense because it means that the world's resources can be stretched as much as possible. A good way of doing this is to recycle material, not simply two, three or four times – but again, and again, and again.

Material followed from start to finish
The quality of the recycling process is one of the most important environmental aspects of Dansk Retursystem's activities, and therefore we place a lot of emphasis on following the material from start to finish. This means drawing up binding contracts direct with the reprocessing companies, which can document the quality and the impact on the environment.

16 times more energy when using new aluminium
This is why we're pleased that 8-9 new cans can now be made for every 10 empty ones returned to stores by consumers. And because it requires 16 times more energy to make one can from newly extracted aluminium, as opposed to re-using the old material, we're also saving a lot of energy.