Mayonnaise, mustard, tomato purée: three products that the Swiss like more than anything else. For many, fish or potato salad just aren’t right without mayonnaise. And what's a Schübling sausage without mustard?  Or spaghetti without a tasty tomato sauce? For the most part, these all come from tubes with the unmistakable ‘aluminium recycling’ symbol. And that makes one thing quite clear: these tubes don’t belong in the rubbish – but in aluminium recycling bins!

Even if tubes are all gunged up with left-over sauce, it’s worth recycling them!


For example, a study by food engineer, Christiane Maillefer from the EMPA in St. Gallen, proved that it’s far more environmentally friendly to produce new tubes from recycled tubes than from new aluminium. That was despite all the cleaning processes required, and despite the fact that the old tubes often had to be transported all the way to recycling centres in Germany or northern Italy.

Incinerating old tubes with normal household rubbish would also be the wrong thing to do, according to Christiane Maillefer. Her study showed that invariably more energy is used, more resources needed, and more emission gasses created in the production of new aluminium than is the case when recycling it.