Why Cans?

We’ve created the ‘Do It With Cans’ website to showcase the breadth of fantastic DIY and craft products that are sold in metal packaging. There is also additional content to show you ways of reusing those cans for other useful purposes around the home and garden.

Our website has a wide range of DIY tutorial blogs to help you navigate those tricky projects, giving you clear instructions and a list of DIY products that you can use to create the same result.

We also have craft tutorial blogs to suggest ways to reuse those same cans to create beautiful and useful items for your home and garden.

Many manufacturers choose metal packaging for their DIY products such as paint, wax, wood stain and spray paints. This is a great choice as metal packaging has many practical benefits, not least of which being that it’s fully recyclable.

Recycling & Sustainability

As a nation, we are all looking at ways we can be a little bit greener – and the great news is that home improvement, DIY and crafting are all areas where environmentally friendly approaches can be easily adopted!

Metal packaging for instance has excellent sustainability credentials. Its strength and barrier properties make it an ideal choice to pack and protect DIY and craft products, and its infinite recyclability means that once you’ve finished with the product you can be sure that the metal from the container will never be wasted. One of the particular benefits of metal packaging is that no matter what product is packed in the can, it is fully recyclable after the product is used.

Please take a look at our blog on how to clean and reuse/recycle a paint can.

How to recycle metal paints cans

In addition, when metal is recycled is saves significant amounts of raw materials, energy and CO₂and because metal packaging is so easy to recycle it also has an impressive recycling rate, all of which is great news for the planet.

A huge 84% of steel packaging is recycled in Europe, making metal the most recycled type of packaging. In the UK, the official recycling rate for steel packaging is 77% which includes the metal containers used to pack DIY and craft products. However, there is good evidence to suggest that the not all the metal packaging that gets recycled is recorded as packaging and so the actual figure is believed to be well above the official one.

Get the facts and figures

Estimated around 14.7 billion metal packaging units produced in the UK each year (Source MPMA) and around 98 billion units produced in the EU each year (Source MPE)