Sure, but consumers use tiny amounts of metal that can be recycled. A can a day is like 10 pounds a year or about $4 worth of scrap. It borders on pointless and certainly is with the associated negatives of the way recycling is done today.
So yeah if you want to collect all your metal scrap for a year and bring it to the local yard then yeah that's a net positive. But skipping a single plane trip is probably worth an entire lifetime of recycling.
According to wikipedia, the amount of aluminum cans recycled is actually substantial:
> Recycling scrap aluminium requires only 5% of the energy used to make new aluminium from the raw ore.[4] For this reason, approximately 36% of all aluminium produced in the United States comes from old recycled scrap.[5] Used beverage containers are the largest component of processed aluminum scrap, and most of it is manufactured back into aluminium cans.[6]
This seems to line up with the fact that you can actually get paid for aluminum cans, the metal used aluminum cans are made of has enough value that it actually makes economic sense to pay people to recycle them.
Looks like that goes to a dead cite but I can find similar numbers from the aluminum trade organization. They don't have an actual methodology that I can see but it's probably safe to assume they're cherry picking numbers. The most likely way is that they're comparing energy used in ore at the factory vs scrap at the factory. That will heavily favor scrap because it excludes all the energy taken to transport it.
>This seems to line up with the fact that you can actually get paid for aluminum cans, the metal used aluminum cans are made of has enough value that it actually makes economic sense to pay people to recycle them.
It's not economically viable to send trucks to pick up people's recycling like most cities do. As an example, my city charged $120 per residence to do that.
You've got to account for everything that goes into the typical single stream recycling we do. The emissions of the trucks, the sorting plants, and the cost to pay people to do this. I've not see an analysis that tracks the carbon emissions of all these to see if it outweighs what we get from recycling. But looking at the dollar flow it seems basically impossible that it's a net positive. You just can't charge $120 a year to haul away $30 of scrap (or less) and end up with a carbon savings.
So yeah if you want to collect all your metal scrap for a year and bring it to the local yard then yeah that's a net positive. But skipping a single plane trip is probably worth an entire lifetime of recycling.