Most of us have stood over a bin holding an empty tin, squinting at a tiny triangle stamped into the base, trying to work out whether the thing goes in yellow or red. The symbol is right there. It still doesn’t answer the question.
Part of the reason is that metal packaging in Australia carries up to three different labelling systems at once, and only one of them was designed around what our kerbside collection can actually process. Here’s how to read each one, and the point where the symbols stop being of any use at all.
The chasing arrows triangle isn’t a promise
The three folded arrows chasing each other, the Mobius loop, were designed by a student named Gary Anderson in 1970, for a competition run by a paperboard company around the first Earth Day. Anderson never trademarked it. Nobody regulates it. Any manufacturer, anywhere, can print it on anything they like.
So a Mobius loop on a steel lid means someone decided the lid was recyclable in theory. It says nothing about whether the sorting facility your council sends to can separate it, sell it, or find a buyer for it. That gap between “recyclable somewhere” and “recycled here” is where most bin confusion starts.
40 is steel, 41 is aluminium
If the triangle has a number inside it, or letters underneath, you’re looking at a material identification code. Most people know the plastics numbers 1 through 7. Metals have their own range, set out in a European scheme (Decision 97/129/EC) that turns up plenty of imported packaging sold here.
There are only two codes that matter:
- 40 (FE) is steel, including tinplate cans
- 41 (ALU) is aluminium
Everything from 42 to 49 is unassigned. So if you see a number in the forties, you’re holding steel or you’re holding aluminium, and nothing else.
Composites get their own numbers, and these are the ones worth knowing about because they catch people out. Code 82 is paper and board with aluminium. Code 90 is plastic with aluminium. Code 91 is plastic with tinplate. Those layers are bonded together, which is exactly why a foil-lined coffee pouch behaves nothing like a foil tray, even though both feel like metal in your hand.
In Australia, the ARL is the label that counts
The Australasian Recycling Label is the one to trust, because it’s the only system built on what recyclers here will genuinely take. It’s run by the Australian Packaging Covenant Organisation, and it assesses each part of a package separately — so a tin might carry one instruction for the can and a different one for the lid.
Three symbols, three meanings:
A solid loop means put it in the recycling bin. There may be a short instruction with it, like rinse first.
An outlined loop, the hollow one, means conditionally recyclable. There’ll be an instruction underneath, usually “return to store” or “check locally”. If you can’t follow that instruction, the item goes in the rubbish.
A bin icon means it isn’t recyclable. Straight to landfill, no debate.
That hollow loop is the one worth slowing down for. People see arrows, assume a yellow bin, and toss it in. Wish-cycling like that contaminates the load, and a contaminated load can cost more to sort than it returns.
The four metal items people get wrong
Foil. Aluminium foil is recyclable, but loose pieces are too light and too small to make it through the sorting machinery — they get lost. Glen Eira Council, like a lot of Melbourne councils, asks you to scrunch small pieces into a ball roughly the size of your fist before it goes in the bin. Collect your scraps, squash them together, then bin the ball.
Aerosol cans. Steel and aluminium aerosols are recyclable in most kerbside services, but only when they’re completely empty. A part-full can is a pressure hazard in a truck. Don’t pierce it, don’t flatten it, and check your own council’s rules, because they vary more than you’d expect.
Bottle caps and small lids. Steel lids off jars are fine if you pop them loose in the bin, though anything smaller than a credit card tends to fall through the sorting screens.
Pots, pans and cutlery. All metal, none of it packaging. Kerbside recycling is a packaging system. Old cookware belongs at a transfer station or a scrap yard, not in the yellow bin.
Past the yellow bin, symbols stop mattering
Here’s the part that surprises people. Once you’re dealing with real volumes of metal — a demolished kitchen, a shed clean-out, a pallet of offcuts from a fabrication job, a stripped-out car — the symbols become irrelevant. Copper pipe has no triangle on it. Neither does an alloy wheel, a hot water cylinder, or a length of steel angle.
At that point only two questions matter: what the metal is, and how much of it you’ve got.
The first split is ferrous versus non-ferrous, and you can sort that with a fridge magnet. If it sticks, it’s iron or steel — ferrous. If it doesn’t, you’re probably holding aluminium, copper, brass or lead, and those are worth considerably more per kilo. One catch: some stainless steels are magnetic and some aren’t, depending on the grade, so stainless is the one metal a magnet won’t settle for you.
Sorting before you sell makes a real difference to what you’re paid. A bin of mixed metal gets priced at the value of its cheapest component. The same bin, separated into copper here, aluminium there, steel over there, is worth substantially more for maybe twenty minutes of work.
Why bother with any of it
Metal is the one material in the waste stream that doesn’t degrade when you recycle it. Paper fibres shorten. Plastic loses quality with every pass. Steel and aluminium can be melted and reformed indefinitely, and the atoms don’t care how many lives they’ve had.
The energy case is hard to argue with too. According to the International Aluminium Institute, recycling aluminium uses about 5% of the energy needed to make it from bauxite in the first place — a 95% saving, with a similar cut to the emissions that come with it.
So the symbols are worth learning. Just don’t expect them to carry you all the way. For a tin in your kitchen, read the ARL. For half a tonne of metal in your driveway, forget the labels, grab a magnet, and start sorting.
And if the pile turns out to be bigger than the boot of your car, that’s the point where a scrap yard beats a bin. Johnny Metal Recycling takes ferrous and non-ferrous metal from households, trades and worksites across Melbourne, sorted or not.