Hands holding a shiny silver climbing carabiner

Can You Recycle Carabiners?

Can you recycle carabiners? Short answer, not the way you are picturing it. Most carabiners are aluminium, which recycles brilliantly, but almost no council bin will take one. You need a scrap metal point, not your kerbside box. Here is the honest version.

Quick answer: carabiners are aluminium or steel, both properly recyclable metals, but they are too small and mixed for a council recycling bin to sort. Take a dead one to a scrap metal merchant or a household waste recycling centre with a metal skip, never loose in the blue bin. And whatever you do, never trust a retired carabiner with your life again, even though it is still fine for almost everything else.

I get asked this more than you would think. Folk send me rope and a wee bag of carabiners turns up in the same box, like I run some kind of hardware shop out the back of a workshop in Torry. I do not. Rope is my material. Metal is a different job. So I have had to learn the honest answer rather than just say "aye, probably" and move on.

What Are Carabiners Actually Made Of?

Most climbing carabiners are forged or machined from an aluminium alloy, the same family of tough, light metal used in bike frames and aircraft parts. A smaller number, mostly the heavy duty ones used in rope access, rescue and via ferrata work, are steel, because steel copes better with repeated hard use. Both metals are, on paper, some of the most recyclable materials there are. Aluminium in particular can be melted down and reused again and again without losing quality.

Can You Put a Carabiner in Your Recycling Bin?

No. Council recycling is built for flat card, tins and plastic bottles moving fast on a sorting line, not a small, dense, oddly shaped bit of shaped metal with a spring gate on it. It can jam machinery, get missed by the sorters entirely, or just get pulled out and binned as contamination. A carabiner going in your household recycling is more likely to end up in landfill than actually recycled, which is the opposite of the point.

Where a Retired Carabiner Actually Goes Household recycling bin ✕ too small, mixed metal, jams the sorting line Scrap metal point or HWRC metal skip ✓ aluminium and steel sorted and weighed by hand Melted down Becomes new aluminium or steel stock Aluminium melts and reforms with no loss of quality, again and again Never put it back into climbing use first, whatever route it takes

So Where Do You Actually Recycle a Carabiner?

A scrap metal merchant or the metal skip at your local household waste recycling centre. Both are set up to handle mixed, oddly shaped metal by hand rather than a machine, which is exactly what a carabiner needs. Most scrap yards will take a handful of carabiners without blinking, and because aluminium scrap has real value, some will even pay you for the weight, though a few carabiners will not exactly fund your next rack of gear. If you have a big bag of them from a gym clear out or a kit cupboard purge, that is worth a proper trip.

Can You Reuse an Old Carabiner for Climbing?

No, not once it is retired, and this is the bit worth being blunt about. A carabiner can look perfectly fine and still have a hairline fracture, a worn gate spring, or metal fatigue from a hard catch you never even felt happen. There is no home test that shows you the inside of a piece of metal. If a carabiner has taken a big fall, been dropped a long way, corroded, or you simply cannot remember its history, it is done as life support gear. That does not mean it is rubbish. It just means its next job is not holding your weight off a cliff.

Does Forma Recycle Carabiners?

Not yet, and I would rather tell you that straight than let you post me a box of metal that just sits on a shelf. Forma Designs Collective, a workshop in Aberdeen, Scotland, that turns retired climbing rope into belts, keychains and coasters, is built around one material, and that material is rope. Metal is a different set of tools and a different skill I have not built yet, though an HDPE plastic line is coming before a metal one. So if you have dead carabiners, the scrap yard is genuinely the right answer, not me.

What I can do is give a carabiner a second life the other way round. My carabiner keychain pairs a new clip with a wee length of rope that already had a story before it got here, off a rope access line or a climbing wall. It is not your old carabiner coming home to you, but it is the same idea. Gear with a story, built to actually get used, not sit in a drawer feeling guilty.

Clearing Out a Kit Cupboard?

The dead rope does not have to go the same way as the dead carabiners. Send it to a workshop that actually wants it.

Shop Gifts For Climbers

So there it is. Carabiners recycle fine in theory, aluminium and steel both do, but they need a scrap yard or a proper metal skip, not your kerbside bin. Retired ones never go back on a harness. And if you would rather your old gear turned into something you would actually carry, have a look at what is available now, or grab a Forma gift card for the climber in your life who has too much kit and nowhere to put it.

Stay classy and remember,
Make Waste Useful.

George

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