§ Mr. Steenasked the Secretary of State for Industry if he will estimate the amount of money and the quantity of metal that would be saved by the recycling of tin cans, if a comparable degree of conservation were achieved to that obtained from existing schemes for recycling glass bottles.
§ Mr. MacGregorThe industries concerned recover their input materials in various ways but, working from industry figures, it appears that, "save a can", if achieving a comparable degree of recovery to the longer-running bottle banks, would yield in the order of 20,000 tonnes of metal per year. The value of this will depend on conditions in the scrap metal market whilst costs which would be incurred in the handling and subsequent treatment of the metal so collected make an assessment of the overall financial savings uncertain. In fact, both "save a can" and bottle banks are planned to be expanded from their present levels.