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If You're Going to Design Something New, Useful and Desirable, Please Make It Out of Recycled Aluminum Cans

Infinitely recyclable, it's better than using recycled plastic--though there are some pluses and minuses

By Rain Noe - November 6, 2019

in Materials | Sustainable Design

Pop quiz: Which is better for the environment, plastic bottles, or aluminum cans?

Aluminum cans are, of course. But that doesn't mean they're all good; the details can get a little complicated. To start off, let's look at this data visualization of how many aluminum cans us Earthlings go through in one year:

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(Note: The creator of the video, MetaBall Studios, cites their data sources as The World Counts and Web Packaging.)

So at press time we were at roughly 178 billions cans used this year, on our way to 200 billion by year's end.

The bad news is, those cans are a bitch to produce, at least from the planet's perspective. The bauxite mining required to produce aluminum "is harsh on the planet…leaving environmental destruction behind," Earth911 reports. "Bauxite mining contributes to habitat loss and water contamination, as well as a slew of other negative environmental impacts, like increased erosion."

The good news is, you can recycle the shit out of aluminum. As in, you can recycle it over and over again, infinitely, unlike plastics, which have a limited amount of times they can be recycled, depending on which type.

The bad news is, at this point we're only recycling about half of our aluminum cans. (Sciencing.com says 50%; Recycle Nation says 55%. Whatever the case, it appears to be growing--in author Annie Leonard's The Story of Stuff: The Impact of Overconsumption on the Planet, Our Communities, and Our Health-And How We Can Make It Better, which was written in 2011, Leonard states that we were recycling 45%.)

The good news is, if we're producing 200 billion cans a year and only recycling half of them, that means there's 100 billion cans' worth of raw material just waiting to be used. And if there's demand for that product, there will be demand to recycle more of the cans. So if you're a designer with the power to spec that out, spec that out!

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Dale Mason

5 years ago

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Matt is 100% correct while the recycling "story" makes everyone feel good the reality is prime/virgin materials in most cases is more cost effective than recycled and for public corporate America that is a very tough sell to shareholders. With that being said there is little incentive for companies to use recycled materials, the USA lacks a country/government wide recycling program due to the cost cand capacity, many smaller EU countries are great at it, they have the government support, capacity and programs to force industry to make to it work. We are getting better but there is no top down drive to make it feasible. I know mulitple plastic recycling facilities that failed over power cost/equipment maintenance etc.

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Matt Edwards

5 years ago

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Those 100 billion cans aren't sitting in a warehouse somewhere waiting to be used, they are leaking into the environment due to lack of collection/recycling infrastructure.
There is already a huge and growing demand for aluminum, for example from cars, construction, and the 200 billion cans we're making! As such, all of the available recycled aluminum is already getting used.
Any further products which require aluminum will just increase the amount we need to produce from bauxite, an incredibly harmful process as you've mentioned.
Replacing plastics with aluminum is likely to dramatically increase the carbon footprint of your product - possibly even if you are replacing a non-recyclable plastic item with an infinitely recyclable aluminium alternative. So, if you're going to design something new, useful and desirable, please scientifically assess the environmental impact of different material options!

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