Aluminum – King of Recyclables
Contributed by Doug Ferguson
If you made it to our Alaska State Fair this past two years, you may have noticed two huge bales of compressed aluminum cans, each weighing a little over 1000 pounds in front of the VCRS Booth (Valley Community for Recycling Solutions) on Miners Loop.
As a volunteer at the booth, it was noticed that these very impressive bales of compressed aluminum beverage cans attracted the attention of many fair attendees as they passed by and often started a conversation about recycling in general. What most didn’t realize is that, while 1 billion tons of aluminum have been produced since the French started doing it in1888 as a rare shiny metal for eating utensils, 75% of it is still in use due to its recyclability!
After the fair, these two bales will join 37 others and will be shipped every six months or so to a metals broker in Tacoma, WA who will send them to a vendor in the U.S. to pretreat, remelt them and recast them into forms that can be used by companies who either make new cans or “extruded” products like kitchen trim, false ceiling supports, cooling fins and other similar aluminum products.
For these applications this pretreating, which removes the organic materials like labels and beverage remains, the remelted aluminum might need some alloy adjustment but doesn’t need much other reprocessing to meet the new product requirements. In other applications like the automobile, aircraft and aerospace industry where both low weight and strength are required, small amounts of other elements, usually less than 5% of volume, are added to the base aluminum to make a stronger aluminum alloy.
Recycling these special alloys is a separate collection and reprocessing process, but still is an order of magnitude cheaper and more energy efficient than extracting aluminum from raw bauxite ore. In fact, recycling scrap aluminum requires only 5-8% of the energy used to make new aluminum from the raw ore. For each ton of aluminum recycled, this saves 24 barrels of crude oil equivalents, over 15 tons of water and more than 9 tons of CO2 equivalents!
In each of these varied application areas there are some fascinating histories involved. For example, out of necessity during WWII, our armed services provided GI’s in the field with beer and soft drinks in steel cans. After the war, returning GI’s had gotten used to them and had a nostalgic preference for cans rather than bottles, which at the time were much cheaper to produce. So, producers continued to sell some beer in cans.
Eventually, in 1958, Adolph Coors manufactured the first aluminum beer can. Its two-piece can hold 7 ounces, instead of the usual 12 ounces, and there were problems with the production process. But it still proved popular enough for Coors and other companies to develop better cans. Introduced next by Schlitz Brewing in 1963 was a steel can with an aluminum top. Because the galvanic action between the steel and the beer was altered by the aluminum, the shelf life of the beer was twice as long! Also, the introduction of the “pull tab” on the aluminum top, replacing a special tool (nicknamed a ‘church key’) to open the cans was a major step forward. By 1968 80% of all beverage companies had adopted this can!
Finally, Reynolds Metals came up with an all-aluminum can and Pepsi-Cola and Coca Cola started using it in 1967. By 1972 the yearly usage of this can came to 8.5 billion shipped and the rest is history!
In the aviation industry there is another fascinating story about aluminum alloys. Again, during WWII our Air Force and aviation industry were taken aback by the outstanding maneuverability of the dreaded Japanese “Zero” fighter plane, considering its size was comparable to our best fighters at the beginning of the war. It was apparent, among other design features, that they had developed a strong aluminum alloy that enabled it to be lighter and more responsive.
In fact the Japanese in 1935 had discovered additive elements (primarily Zinc) to the aluminum created a much stronger alloy.. This was a tightly held secret, but finally, when a mostly intact “Zero” became available from a crash in the Aleutian Islands in 1943, Alcoa reverse engineered the metallurgy involved and the new aluminum alloy was discovered. This alloy, now known as 7075 A aluminum, went on to spawn a whole range of aluminum alloys for the aircraft and aerospace industry.
There are many other fascinating stories surrounding the history of the metal aluminum, including its origins in France, initiated by Napoleon as a shiny rare metal, and also its recycling history. Based on my reading of this history and the amounts of the metal in use today, I would say “Aluminum is King of Recyclables!”