Are Your Alloy Wheels Recyclable?

So you’ve seriously curbed, pranged, dented or even cracked one of your wheels. No option for it, time to fork out for a new one, right? Or even a set of four. Well, perhaps.

What are the options?

Aluminium, the principal metal used in the manufacture of your rims comes from a raw mined ore called bauxite. It’s an extremely energy expensive process to extract the pure aluminium from the ore, using ferociously high temperatures, not to mention the energy-consuming mining operation to dig the stuff up in the first place.

Recycling takes just 5% of the energy it does to obtain aluminium from bauxite, so recycling any aluminium you can, be it kitchen foil or drinks cans, is the most worthwhile pursuit of any home recycling you can do. To give an example, the energy saved by recycling just one coke can will light a 100Watt bulb for 20 hours.

Recycling a ton of aluminium saves the equivalent of 2,350 gallons (8,896 litres) of petrol. It would take an average family home ten years to consume the equivalent amount of electricity.

When considering recycling alloy wheels, it’s not as straightforward as you might at first think. Alloys, as the name suggests, are made from complex combinations of different metals. Originally, they were made from pure magnesium, a valuable and easily recycled metal, that unfortunately had the habit of bursting into incredibly hot flames when sparked by a high-speed blow out, that usually meant the loss of the entire car, if not the driver too. However, as it is so light, many F1 rims are still made from magnesium.

Different brands and manufacturers use a myriad of different compounds, so recycling is quite a complex procedure, requiring the metals to be re-separated from contaminants by first breaking them down into pieces, utilising magnetic separation to pull out any iron and then chemicals for the other metals present, such as molybdenum, chromium, etc. Recyclers will therefore tend to group the wheels into batches of the same alloy composition to simplify this process.

Because of this, if you are thinking you might get some money back rather than simply dropping them off at your local recycling centre, going to a scrapyard or dealer will probably fetch you less than a tenner per corner, regardless of the purchase price and even less with the tyre still attached, so make sure they are clean, including the valve, if this is the direction you want to go in. 

However, before recycling of any kind is decided on, it really is well worth you considering getting them repaired. You obviously bought them for a reason in the first place and getting them fixed will prove a lot cheaper than buying new, especially if you are only able to buy a set, rather than single wheels.

Even cracked and seriously damaged wheels can be repaired, although it may take a little time, so look into the costs with a wheel refurb expert, before you jettison your pride and joy at fire-sale prices or worse. You could also consider also selling on to a reconditioner, who will no doubt snap your arm off at the chance of a cut-price bargain, presuming you to be ignorant of what can actually be fixed. What looks like a major ding to you, looks like free money to him.

This of course, is the real way to recycle and works out cheaper all round; to you and to the environment. Wheels are after all, only metal and metal can be worked and reworked, bent, fixed and filled.