ubc aluminum can recycling rate data: two continents delivered as rows

A lookup question sitting on top of a two-continent join. UBC means used beverage cans, and the rate counts the share of those cans that come back as metal. No statistical agency owns the metric: it is compiled by the industry bodies that count the cans themselves. The Aluminum Association - Industry Statistics tracks used beverage can recycling across twenty-five-plus report families covering North American orders, shipments, capacity and production, reported separately for the United States and Canada plus a combined North American view. European Aluminium - data and reports compiles the EU beverage can recycling results jointly with Metal Packaging Europe, one announcement per reporting year.

Rows flat as they land - one rate line per geography per reporting year, with the companion measures riding along:

``` # North American series -- annual rate rows, three geographies record : The Aluminum Association - Industry Statistics series : used beverage can recycling rate grain : annual, split United States / Canada / North America combined published : annually since the late 2000s

# companion containers-slice record carrying the quoted values metric : us_aluminum_beverage_can_recycling_rate_pct 2020 : 42 # originally reported 45, restated 2021 : 42 2022 : 42 2023 : 43 targets : 70_by_2030 / 80_by_2040 / 90plus_by_2050

# European series -- one joint announcement per reporting year record : European Aluminium - data and reports metric : eu_aluminium_beverage_can_recycling_rate_pct 2021 : 76.0% 2022 : 580,000 tonnes recycled, 5.4 Mt CO2 saved 2023 : 76.3%, 5.7 Mt CO2eq avoided

Read the two rate blocks together and the transatlantic gap tells itself: 76.3 percent versus about 43 percent for the same reference year, more than thirty points apart on different boundaries and conventions. Read the North American block twice and a quieter detail surfaces - the 2020 row exists in two vintages, 45 as first reported and 42 once restated. Both ship, because a citation that cannot be checked against what was originally printed is not a citation.

A short dictionary carries the whole subject, and every field arrives with definitions and worked examples attached so nobody reverse-engineers meaning from report layout.

recycling_rate_pct is the headline - percentage of aluminum beverage cans recycled in the reference year, attributed to the joint European Aluminium and Metal Packaging Europe announcements on the European side and the association's annual can-tables on the North American side. tonnes_recycled converts the percentage back into physical cans, 580,000 tonnes for the 2022 EU edition. co2_saving_mt attaches the greenhouse-gas claim the announcements lead with - 5.7 Mt CO2eq for 2023. recycling_target_pct carries the forward commitments the actuals get read against. geography_scope separates United States, Canada and combined North America from the EU aggregate, the field that keeps a transatlantic comparison honest. And vintage_flag marks restatements, so a 45-turned-42 row never poses as unrevised.

• Geography: United States, Canada and combined North America in the Aluminum Association record; the European Union aggregate in the European Aluminium record, deliberately not split by country; global context from the ten IAI reporting areas.
• Temporal: the North American rate tables publish annually since the late 2000s inside a statistics programme whose verified monthly production series runs January 1998 through May 2023 - five worksheets, about 380 rows per country block. European recycling editions are observed for 2021, 2022 and 2023, with the Environmental Profile Report's 2024 revision and Net Zero pathways extending to 2050. International Aluminium Institute Statistics reaches back to January 1973 for production, estimated China from January 1999.
• Granularity: annual rate rows by geography; monthly for the surrounding production panels; process-step level inside the Environmental Profile Report.

Because the numerator and the denominator live in different records on purpose. The rate counts cans; the circularity argument needs tonnes of metal, and tonnes arrive from elsewhere in the slice.

Boundary differences do the rest. The North American record reports the United States and Canada separately plus a combined sheet; the European figure aggregates the EU with no country-level cut. Deposit-system countries measure collection differently from curbside ones. None of that makes either number wrong - it makes averaging them a bug. Delivered side by side on one schema, the comparison becomes a filter operation instead of an argument.

Price benchmarks complete the incentive chain: IndexMundi Aluminum Monthly Price holds the LME ingot quote across roughly 360 monthly observations reaching July 1996, and the Hugging Face - global_aluminum_price_daily dataset adds 6,076 daily OHLC bars from May 2014 to July 2026. Join the price to the rate and the relationship between can value and return volume becomes testable rather than anecdotal. For the wider European frame, data.europa.eu - EU Open Data Portal (aluminium search) indexes roughly 550 catalogued records matching the term, national packaging and waste tables among them.

Sustainability and ESG teams anchor circularity claims in rate rows that carry their methodology, tonnage and CO2 companions attached - a 76.3 percent figure survives assurance review when the 5.7 Mt CO2eq arithmetic travels with it.

Journalists, academics and students quote the targets-versus-actuals line as an accountability series, with retained revision vintages keeping older citations checkable - see aluminum for journalists and academics.

Packaging and procurement analysts run the material-substitution test the whole subject exists for: steel versus aluminum versus plastic recovery, compared on one schema instead of across four report formats. Personas mapped across the full slice live on the aluminum data hub.

This page covered the rate itself and the records that give it a denominator, a price and a paper trail. Continue with:

For the structured index behind all of it, the aluminum data hub lists every cataloged record with coverage, granularity and use cases - request a sample scoped to your span.