Aluminum Cans
You may feel a twinge of eco-guilt every time you throw away an aluminum can. This article will give you a reason for saving these cans for recycling.
Aluminum recycling is notable for its efficiency. Recycling one can saves about 95 percent of the energy that would be used in producing a new can. It has never been cheaper, faster or more energy-efficient to recycle aluminum than it is today. Aluminum cans are 100% recyclable, making them the most recyclable (and valuable) of all materials. The aluminum you can toss into your recycling bin today will be completely recycled and back on the store shelf in just 60 days.
Aluminum is considered a sustainable metal, which means it can be recycled again and again with no loss of material. Recycling aluminum saves 90% to 95% of the energy needed to make aluminum from bauxite ore. It does not matter if you are making aluminum cans, roof gutters or cookware; it is simply much more energy-efficient to recycle existing aluminum to create the aluminum needed for new products than it is to make aluminum from virgin natural resources.
So how much energy are we talking about here? Recycling one pound of aluminum (33 cans) saves about 7 kilowatt-hours (kWh) of electricity. With the energy it takes to make just one new aluminum can from bauxite ore, you can make 20 new recycled aluminum cans.
Putting the energy question into even more down-to-earth terms, the energy saved by recycling one aluminum can is enough to power a television set for three hours.
The opposite of saving energy is wasting it. Toss an aluminum can into the trash instead of recycling it, and the energy required to replace that discarded resource with new aluminum from bauxite ore is enough to keep a 100-watt incandescent light bulb burning for five hours or to power the average laptop computer for 11 hours, according to the Container Recycling Institute.
Aluminum is the very best material for recycling as it does not take a lot of processes to become raw aluminum again. The cans are thrown in a furnace where the toxins are burnt (fumes are filtered and hence no toxins are released into the atmosphere), and the molten aluminum is returned to its raw form where it can be made into more cans or containers, or even a boat.
Another question asked was whether a can takes longer to degrade in a landfill or the ocean? In the ocean it will take up to 200 years, yet the plastic from the can will remain in the ocean forever. Aluminum takes 200 to 500 years to fully degrade in the landfill, but the correct answer to this is that aluminum cans should not end up in landfill, they should be recycled. So….do your part to keep Aluminum cans out of the landfill.
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