While the price of recycled plastic has cratered this year, one container in the bin still holds real value: the aluminum can. In the Texas market, used beverage cans have traded around 55 cents a pound in early 2026, a stable level that stands in sharp relief to post-consumer PET bottles, which fell to a national average near 1.7 cents a pound in March, according to scrap-market data compiled by Okon Recycling and the Secondary Materials Pricing Index.
Each can carries roughly two cents of scrap value — small on its own, but the aluminum industry argues it is the money that keeps the whole recycling system solvent.
Aluminum cans are “far more valuable than glass or plastic,” the Aluminum Association notes, “helping make municipal recycling programs financially viable and effectively subsidizing the recycling of less valuable materials in the bin.” A can moves from the recycling bin back onto a store shelf as a new can in under 60 days on average, the association says.
Advocates for a Texas container-deposit system say that value is why those system captures so much more of it. States with deposit systems recover aluminum cans at an average rate near 68 percent, against roughly 22 percent in states without a refund, according to industry figures cited by scrap recyclers — a gap that translates directly into tons of high-value metal either recovered or buried.
For Texas, that gap is an economic loss the state absorbs every year. Texans bought 23.7 billion beverage containers in 2021, and nearly 80 percent were landfilled or littered, according to a Texas A&M Mosbacher Institute analysis cited by the National Association for PET Container Resources, which pegs the wasted recyclable material at roughly $372 million a year.
The waste is compounded by a supply paradox: Texas manufacturers that want recycled feedstock cannot get enough of it domestically. The Can Manufacturers Institute has said the can-sheet industry, which has invested heavily in U.S. production, “can’t get enough used beverage cans back to feed those plants,” and the Aluminum Association counts more than $10 billion in domestic manufacturing investment announced over the past decade.
Glass tells a similar story — a Knauf Insulation plant near McGregor testified during the 2025 session that it needs 70 to 90 tons of cullet a day and must import glass from other states and countries to get it.
The policy vehicle that would capture that material stalled last year. Identical deposit-return bills, House Bill 2048 and Senate Bill 728, set a 75 percent beverage-container recovery target by 2035 and cleared the House Environmental Regulation Committee on a 6-0 vote on May 2, 2025, before running out of time at the end of the session. Backers expect a refile in 2027.
Opponents, chiefly large beverage companies and some retailers, counter that a deposit functions as a hidden cost on consumers, adds handling and storage costs for stores, and duplicates curbside programs Texans already pay for. Deposit advocates respond that the economics have shifted: with virgin plastic cheap and domestic manufacturers hungry for recycled metal and glass, a refund system is increasingly framed less as an environmental mandate than as a domestic-supply and jobs argument — one that captures material the state is currently paying to throw away and, then, import.