Comment by 1970-01-01
4 hours ago
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)?
Al uses a lot of energy. Recycling is much less than uses to get it from mining.
I've never heard of anyone using aluminum for a building (though I'm sure it has been done) - the properties in general make it a poor choice (see a real meteorologist for details - alloy matters and there are many choices). Al is commonly used for the skin of a building, but not the structural parts.
Al is commonly made where energy is cheap (generally renewable energy!) and then transported around the world. I have no idea what is in Spain or New Zealand, but I'd expect someone in Spain is making things with Al, and they in turn will be glad to recycle anything you can get to them.
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.