Tessa Munt, MP for Wells and Mendip Hills and rural areas close to Burnham-On-Sea, claims to have uncovered an extraordinary “rip-off” scam involving the recycling of scrap aluminium. Now Tessa Munt is calling for a complete overhaul of the recycling system – which involves a staggering 14 billion cans a year.
Tessa warns that councils, including those near Burnham-On-Sea, are being “misled” and losing out on millions of pounds that could be spent in their communities.
Ms Munt says her investigation has revealed huge inconsistencies in how local authorities benefit from the recycling of the UK’s 14 billion aluminium cans each year. She told the Mirror that 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.
She also raised concerns that some councils who specify that their aluminium should be recycled in the UK are instead seeing it shipped to China, meaning foreign companies profit from British waste.
Ms Munt said the situation “makes no sense” at a time when aluminium has been designated a critical mineral. “For far too long profit‑driven scrap merchants have sold our aluminium abroad without any consideration for the national interest,” she said. “If the critical mineral strategy is to work, the Government needs to clamp down on this.”
She added that past governments had “very little idea” what was happening to the UK’s scrap aluminium. “When I was told something like a billion pounds worth of aluminium is being sold abroad for recycling and reprocessing each year, and at the same time we’re spending £5 billion importing aluminium, I thought this is bonkers.”
The issue is one Ms Munt has taken a personal interest in for decades. For 25 years she has collected scrap aluminium from across her Somerset constituency, storing it in her shed until she has enough to sell to a local scrap dealer — with all proceeds donated to charity.
Earlier this year she sent Freedom of Information requests to every council in the country to understand how aluminium is handled and where it ends up. She is now analysing the responses ahead of a debate she has secured in the House of Commons.
“It’s becoming very clear to me that a great many of our councils are being misled and, in some cases, royally ripped off when it comes to the money available from recycling their aluminium,” she said.
Her inquiries also uncovered cases where councils who believed their aluminium was being recycled domestically later discovered it had been exported to China. “It’s insane that councils all over the country are losing valuable income from this,” she said. “They need to take better control over what’s happening to their scrap aluminium.”
As part of her research, Ms Munt visited the Novelis recycling complex in Warrington — the largest aluminium recycling plant in the UK. Plant manager Alan Sweeney told her the site currently recycles 200,000 tonnes of aluminium each year, around eight billion cans, and that an ongoing £75 million expansion will allow the plant to recycle every aluminium can produced in the UK annually.
Ms Munt said seeing the process first‑hand — from scrap cans to 27‑tonne ingots ready to be turned back into new cans within 60 days — reinforced her belief that the UK should be keeping its aluminium on home soil. “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.
