An aluminum beverage can starts to melt at roughly 600–660 °C (about 1,100–1,220 °F), depending on which part of the can you are talking about. That range sits below the melting point of pure aluminum, which is 660 °C (1,220 °F), because cans are not pure aluminum. They are made from alloys deliberately designed to be stronger, more formable, and lighter than the pure metal, and those added elements shift the melting behavior in ways that matter for anyone trying to melt cans down at home, recycle them industrially, or simply understand what happens when aluminum meets serious heat.
Why a Can Does Not Melt at a Single Temperature
Pure metals have a crisp melting point: solid one degree below, liquid one degree above. Alloys behave differently. Because aluminum cans contain small but deliberate amounts of other metals, they melt across a range rather than at a single temperature. The alloy begins softening and turning partially liquid at its “solidus” temperature and becomes fully liquid at its “liquidus” temperature. Between those two temperatures the metal exists in a slushy, partially molten state. For the alloys used in beverage cans, that window spans roughly 30–80 °C, which is why you will see a range quoted rather than one neat number.
The alloying elements that create this range are there for good reason. Manganese makes the can body strong enough to hold carbonation pressure. Magnesium improves the formability of the lid so it can be stamped into a pull-tab without cracking. Small amounts of iron, silicon, and copper show up as well. Each element lowers the temperature at which melting begins, broadens the melting window, or both.
The Body and the Lid Are Different Alloys
A standard beverage can is actually two separate pieces made from two separate alloys, and their melting ranges are not the same. The body, which includes the cylindrical wall and the domed bottom, is typically drawn and ironed from 3004 or 3104 aluminum alloy. These alloys contain about 1% manganese and roughly 1% magnesium, along with traces of other elements. Their solidus sits near 629 °C (about 1,165 °F) and their liquidus near 654 °C (about 1,210 °F).
The lid is a different story. It is usually stamped from alloy 5182, which contains approximately 4.5% magnesium as its primary addition.1Micron. The effect of grain refining on the microsegregation of aluminium–magnesium alloy 5182 That higher magnesium content pushes the solidus down to around 577 °C (roughly 1,070 °F), while the liquidus sits near 638 °C (about 1,180 °F). So the lid begins to soften and melt at a lower temperature than the body does. If you heated a whole can evenly, the lid would start losing structural integrity before the sidewall.
Research on used-beverage-can scrap confirms this mixed composition. Electrochemical studies characterize molten can scrap as an aluminum-magnesium-manganese blend, reflecting the merger of body and lid alloys when cans are melted together.2Journal of The Electrochemical Society. Separation of Mg and Mn from Beverage Can Scrap using a Recessed-Channel Cell Because the two alloys contribute different amounts of magnesium and manganese, the exact melting behavior of a batch of scrap depends on the ratio of lids to bodies in the mix.
What Happens to the Coatings Before the Metal Melts
Before the aluminum itself reaches its melting range, the can goes through a series of changes that have nothing to do with the metal. The outside of a beverage can is covered in printed ink and a thin layer of lacquer. The inside is lined with a polymer coating, usually an epoxy or polyester, that keeps the drink from contacting bare aluminum. These organic layers start breaking down long before the aluminum softens.
Thermal analysis of coated aluminum scrap shows that the polymeric fraction undergoes major decomposition between about 300 and 480 °C, well below the alloy’s solidus. The weight lost from these coatings ranged from roughly 1.6% to 4.6% of total sample weight depending on the type of coating.3Journal of Analytical and Applied Pyrolysis. Study on pyrolysis behavior of polymeric coated aluminium scrap using TGA and Py-GC/MS That might sound small, but it means the can gives off fumes and smoke as the coatings burn off. Anyone melting cans should expect visible off-gassing and should work outdoors or with proper ventilation. The coatings are long gone by the time the metal starts to flow.
Melting Cans at Home
Aluminum cans are one of the easiest metals to melt in a backyard setup because the temperatures involved are within reach of simple fuel sources. A propane torch or a charcoal-fired crucible furnace can get there. One laboratory-scale furnace using coconut shell charcoal as fuel reached temperatures of 690–729 °C, enough to melt used aluminum in under an hour.4Journal of Physics: Conference Series. Design of Aluminium Melting Furnace Using Coconut Shell Charcoal on Laboratory Scale as Learning Medium That study melted half a kilogram of scrap aluminum in 48 to 55 minutes, depending on how much fuel was used and how well the furnace retained heat.
A purpose-built crucible furnace with a gas or forced-air charcoal design can reach well over 1,000 °C. One such furnace achieved an internal temperature of 1,200 °C, far more than needed for aluminum and enough for many other engineering metals as well.5Materials Today: Proceedings. Design and construction of gas and charcoal-fired crucible furnace For melting cans specifically, you do not need anywhere near that temperature. Reaching 700 °C with a steady heat source is plenty to fully liquify beverage-can alloys.
The practical challenge is less about peak temperature and more about heat retention. Cans are extremely thin-walled, so they lose heat rapidly. They also trap air inside, which means they tend to float on the melt surface and oxidize rather than sinking into the liquid pool. Experienced hobbyists crush cans flat before adding them to the crucible to reduce trapped air and speed up melting. Even so, a significant portion of the aluminum oxidizes on the surface and turns into a powdery gray dross that must be skimmed off. Do not expect to recover 100% of the aluminum you started with; losses of 10–20% are common in small-scale setups, and even industrial operations focus heavily on minimizing dross formation.
Why Temperature Control Matters During Recycling
If aluminum just needs to get past roughly 660 °C to become fully liquid, you might wonder why recyclers care whether the melt reaches 700, 750, or 800 °C. The reason is that aluminum reacts aggressively with oxygen at high temperatures, forming aluminum oxide (the same compound that makes up sapphires and rubies, though in this context it is just a gritty waste product). The hotter the melt, the more oxide forms on the surface, and the more aluminum is lost as dross rather than recovered as usable metal.
Industrial research on aluminum scrap recycling found that keeping the melting temperature below 750 °C is crucial for good recovery rates. Higher temperatures caused the loss of low-melting alloying elements and increased oxidation, while controlled-temperature melting reduced dross formation to around 5%.6Materials Today: Proceedings. Aluminium scrap recycling in a production furnace: Minimizing dross formation for sustainable and efficient recovery That 5% figure represents a well-run furnace. In less controlled settings the losses climb quickly.
Temperature also affects what happens to the alloying elements. Magnesium, which is present at meaningful levels in can lid alloy, oxidizes preferentially because it is even more reactive than aluminum. Overheating the melt burns off magnesium first, changing the composition of the recycled metal. If a recycler wants to turn old cans back into can-grade alloy, they need that magnesium to still be there. This is one reason recyclers sometimes process lids and bodies separately or add fresh magnesium to the melt to compensate for losses.
Manganese presents a different problem. Unlike magnesium, it does not burn off easily, but it can be difficult to remove when it is not wanted in the final product. Research on electrochemical separation found that specialized cells could remove 99% of magnesium from molten can scrap but only about 46% of the manganese, making manganese the more stubborn element to deal with during alloy refining.2Journal of The Electrochemical Society. Separation of Mg and Mn from Beverage Can Scrap using a Recessed-Channel Cell For most small-scale or hobbyist melting, none of this matters because the goal is usually to cast the aluminum into a new shape, not to hit a precise alloy specification. But it explains why large recycling operations treat temperature and composition as tightly linked variables.
Campfire, Oven, or Blowtorch
A common question is whether household heat sources can reach the temperature needed to melt a can. Here is a rough guide to what different sources can actually achieve:
- Kitchen oven: Most top out at about 260 °C (500 °F), nowhere close. You will burn the coatings off and soften the can slightly, but you will not melt it.
- Wood campfire: Typical temperatures in the bed of coals range from 600 to 900 °C. A well-built fire with good airflow can melt a can, especially if the can is buried directly in hot coals and left for a while. Results are inconsistent because campfire temperatures vary widely.
- Propane torch: A standard handheld propane torch flame reaches about 1,995 °C. It can easily melt a can, though doing so in open air is inefficient because heat escapes in every direction. A crucible concentrates the heat.
- Charcoal forge or crucible furnace: With forced air, charcoal burns hot enough to melt aluminum comfortably. As the furnace studies above showed, even basic setups reach 700+ °C without difficulty.
The takeaway for anyone thinking about melting cans is that you do not need exotic equipment, but you do need something that sustains heat in an enclosed space. A bare flame in open air wastes most of its energy. A simple insulated container with a lid, a crucible inside, and a heat source underneath or fed through a side port is the basic setup that works.
Why Aluminum Cans Melt More Easily Than Other Scrap Aluminum
Not all aluminum scrap behaves the same in a furnace. Beverage cans are remarkably thin, typically around 0.1 mm (about four thousandths of an inch) in the sidewall after the drawing and ironing process. That extreme thinness means cans heat up almost instantly compared to a chunk of cast aluminum or a thick extruded bar. A pot or engine block made from a different aluminum alloy might take much longer to melt simply because of its thermal mass, even if its alloy technically has a similar melting range.
The flip side is that this thinness makes cans prone to oxidation. A solid block of aluminum has relatively little surface area exposed to air compared to its volume. A crushed can, by contrast, is mostly surface area. Every fold and crumple creates a pocket where air is trapped against the metal. When the can heats up, those surfaces oxidize rapidly, converting good aluminum into worthless oxide powder. This is why melting cans produces a disproportionate amount of dross compared to melting thicker scrap forms.
Some hobbyists pre-melt cans into small ingots in batches, skimming dross as they go, and then re-melt the cleaner ingots for casting. This two-step approach reduces the surface-area problem during the final melt, producing cleaner castings with fewer inclusions and gas pockets. It adds time, but the quality difference in the finished casting is significant.
How Cooling Rate Changes What You Get
Melting aluminum cans is only half the story. What happens when the metal solidifies again depends on how quickly it cools. Slow cooling gives the alloying elements time to segregate and form large, coarse structures within the metal. Research on aluminum alloys shows that slow cooling allows the formation of multiple coarse intermetallic compounds, while faster cooling suppresses those coarse phases and produces a finer, more uniform microstructure.7PubMed Central. The Solidification Behavior of AA2618 Aluminum Alloy and the Influence of Cooling Rate In plain terms, a slowly cooled casting tends to be more brittle and uneven internally, while a rapidly cooled one is stronger and more consistent.
For hobbyist casting with melted cans, this means the mold material matters. Pouring into a thick steel mold pulls heat away quickly and produces a denser, harder ingot. Pouring into a sand mold cools the metal more slowly and tends to produce a softer, more porous result. Neither is inherently wrong; the choice depends on what you plan to do with the casting. Studies on aluminum-silicon-copper alloys confirmed that high cooling rates also prevent the formation of needle-like iron-containing phases that make the metal brittle and hard to machine.8Mat. Res. Effects of Solidification Rate in the Microstructure of Al-Si5Cu3 Aluminum Cast Alloy While beverage-can alloys have a different composition than the alloy in that study, the general principle holds: faster cooling tends to produce better mechanical properties in aluminum castings.
Safety Concerns Worth Knowing
Molten aluminum is far more dangerous than its relatively low melting point might suggest. At roughly 660 °C, the liquid metal is hot enough to cause severe burns instantly on contact with skin. But the most serious hazard is not direct contact; it is water. If molten aluminum comes into contact with even a small amount of water, the water flashes to steam so rapidly that it can cause a violent explosion, spraying molten metal in every direction. This is not a theoretical risk. Industrial aluminum foundries treat moisture exclusion as a primary safety concern, and multiple serious incidents have occurred when wet scrap or damp tools were introduced into a melt.
For anyone melting cans at home, the practical rules follow from this hazard. Every tool that touches the melt, including the crucible, tongs, skimmer, and mold, must be completely dry and preheated. Cans should be dry. The work area should be on dry ground, away from puddles or damp concrete. Wearing proper protective gear, including a face shield and heat-resistant gloves, is not optional. The temperatures are within easy reach of simple equipment, which makes the process feel accessible, but the consequences of a steam explosion or a spill of molten metal are serious enough to deserve real caution.
Fumes are another concern, particularly from the coatings discussed earlier. The polymer lining inside a can releases gases as it decomposes, and some of those decomposition products are irritating or toxic. Burning off coatings in open air with good ventilation is standard practice; doing it in an enclosed garage or workshop is asking for trouble. Some hobbyists burn the coatings off first in a separate step, heating the cans to around 500 °C in a well-ventilated area before transferring them to the crucible for actual melting. This keeps the worst of the fumes away from the casting process.
Aluminum Cans Versus Other Common Aluminum Objects
If you are melting aluminum, cans are not your only source of scrap, and different aluminum objects are made from different alloys with different melting ranges. Automotive parts like engine blocks and wheels are often cast from aluminum-silicon alloys (like A356), which have a solidus around 555 °C and a liquidus near 615 °C, actually lower than beverage cans. Extruded aluminum used in window frames, railings, and structural shapes is often 6061 or 6063 alloy, with melting ranges closer to 580–650 °C. Aircraft-grade aluminum like 2024 alloy contains more copper and has a solidus around 500 °C.
The practical implication is that if you throw a mix of aluminum scrap types into the same crucible, the different alloys melt at different rates and produce a combined alloy whose properties you cannot easily predict. For hobbyist casting this is usually fine, since the final alloy will still be predominantly aluminum and will behave reasonably well. But if you need specific mechanical properties for a structural application, mixing alloys is a bad idea. Industrial recyclers go to considerable lengths to sort aluminum by alloy family before melting precisely because contamination degrades the value of the recycled metal.
Beverage cans remain the single most recycled aluminum product in the world, partly because they are relatively uniform in composition and partly because the collection infrastructure already exists. The fact that their melting point sits comfortably within the range of simple heat sources, and that the alloys involved are well-understood and forgiving to work with, makes them an accessible starting point for anyone curious about metalworking. Just respect the heat, keep everything dry, and work where the air can move.