Lib Dems Pressures Government to Safeguard Critical Aluminium Supply Chains

​Liberal Democrat MPs, Sarah Dyke and Tessa Munte, have called on the government to implement immediate policy interventions to protect the UK's domestic aluminium processing sector. Highlighting a growing vulnerability in national supply chains, Sarah Dyke MP warned that too much valuable scrap material is currently being exported overseas at the expense of local industry.

​"Aluminium is a critical mineral, vital to our defence, construction and green energy industries," stated Sarah Dyke, emphasising its formal recognition as a strategic resource by both the UK government and the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO). "Too much UK scrap aluminium is being exported overseas while domestic reprocessing declines."

​Industry data underscores the scale of the challenge. Between 2021 and 2024, the combined UK and European reprocessing rate for British scrap packaging dropped sharply from 83% to 68%. Projections from the Aluminium Packaging Recycling Organisation (Alupro) indicate that these figures will continue to fall without robust regulatory action, even as domestic capacity has expanded through multi-million-pound private investments. At present, substantial volumes of scrap are being shipped to markets in Asia and the United States, creating structural vulnerabilities for domestic manufacturing and infrastructure.

The campaign has also drawn attention to profound inconsistencies at the local authority level. Earlier this summer, Liberal Democrat MP for Wells and Mendip Hills, Tessa Munt, highlighted major discrepancies in how councils financially benefit from handling a share of the 14 billion aluminium cans collected across the UK annually.

 Following Freedom of Information requests sent to councils nationwide, Tessa Munt revealed that neighbouring authorities utilising identical collection systems experienced drastically different outcomes, with one generating over £1 million a year from its aluminium waste while another received nothing.

​"Neighbouring councils with almost identical recycling systems were seeing dramatically different returns, with one making more than £1 million a year from its aluminium, while the other received nothing at all,"Tessa Munt MP

​Furthermore, investigations uncovered instances where authorities specifying domestic recycling discovered their materials were nevertheless shipped abroad. "Aluminium should be recycled in the UK, instead we are seeing it shipped to China, meaning foreign companies profit from British waste," Tessa Munt stated, adding that "for far too long profit-driven scrap merchants have sold our aluminium abroad without any consideration for the national interest." She argued that past Governments maintained "very little idea" regarding the true trajectory of national scrap, pointing out the contradiction of exporting roughly a billion pounds worth of aluminium annually while simultaneously spending £5 billion on imports.

​To evaluate domestic capacity firsthand, Tessa Munt visited the Novelis recycling complex in Warrington, the largest aluminium recycling plant in the nation. Plant management confirmed that the facility processes 200,000 tonnes of aluminium annually, equivalent to roughly eight billion cans and noted that an ongoing £75 million expansion will soon position the plant to handle every single aluminium can produced in the UK each year. Observing the transformation of scrap cans into 27-tonne re-usable ingots within a 60-day turnaround cycle reinforced her stance. "It’s economic madness that nothing is really being done to stop aluminium being sent to China and the Far East, when it should be coming right here and to other UK recycling facilities," she said.

​Pointing to regional waste management initiatives in the South West as a blueprint for wider reform, Sarah Dyke MP emphasised what can be achieved through dedicated local execution. "Somerset is showing what can be done," she noted, pointing to an operational model where nearly 150,000 tonnes of waste were recently collected, with 87.5% reprocessed domestically and over half of that total processed within the county itself.

​"Reprocessing it domestically protects the broader UK supply chain, supporting defence, construction and green energy infrastructure," Sarah Dyke added. "In parliamentary, I pushed the Government for action to strengthen UK recycling and protect our supply chains."