Comment by t1234s
5 hours ago
I started throwing everything in the garbage except aluminum over the past couple of years. Better off in a US landfill than shipped of to asia and dumped in the ocean.
5 hours ago
I started throwing everything in the garbage except aluminum over the past couple of years. Better off in a US landfill than shipped of to asia and dumped in the ocean.
Asia stopped taking our semi-recyclable waste a few years back, which is how all this greenwashing was exposed
Though specifically they would have welcomed sorted recyclables, but for whatever reason the US seemed entirely unable to correctly label the goods being shipped and were just shipping mixed trash and claiming it was something else.
Does your municipality offer composting? That's where a lot of my waste paper ends up.
I hate to agree but you're basically right. If we switched everything disposable (glass, plastic, paper) into an aluminum version of itself, the world would be a much better place. Aluminum pizza boxes and Amazon shipments would be weird, and would probably need rounded corners (hello iPhone designers going into box design at retirement) but they would be 100.000% recyclable.
If we had arbitrary energy to spend it would be great, but it takes a massive amount of money to purify from ore, and a still significant amount to scrap into new material, especially with high surface area aluminum like cans and boxes. Iron is the easiest energy win, but you also have to deal with corrosion and rust.
Would they? Aluminum needs a lot of energy to melt and then reform into something new. Since the alloy is not known they need to refine the different metals out just to ensure that they get the correct alloy for the user. Mining Al uses a lot more energy.
That is I suspect the total damage from new plastic is less than recycled Al. Someone needs to find numbers to verify this of course.
I've wondered about this because I've heard the same thing from my partner - in Engineering school in Spain, she was told that waste aluminium as a building material should be avoided because it was so expensive to recycle. But we recycle aluminium here in New Zealand - perhaps it's something to do with being able to use green energy at night (New Zealand has abundant hydro power)?
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I'm finding info of just 5% from a scrap ingot:
https://aluminium-guide.com/aluminium-alloys-food-beverage-c...
Aluminium is a really bad container for aciduous food stuff. You need a good plastic liner in the cans to handle it. So it is absolutely not a perfect container.
The problem is the packaging not the recycling.