Recycling Aluminum Cans

Photo Source: aixcracker

One of the lowest hanging fruits in the environmental movement is recycling.  It is not as sexy as an electric Tesla Roadster, or as stately as a wind turbine along a country road, but it is even more important.   If we can’t master the simple tasks like recycling, bigger problems like reconfiguring a smart electric grid or rebalancing complicated eco-systems don’t stand much of a chance.

Take the recycling of aluminum cans as an example.  Since America has been doing it for decades we’ve streamlined the entire process.  Everybody knows aluminum containers can be recycled.  Every municipality’s recycling program includes them in their collection.  Beverage producers support recycling programs because it saves them money.  Twenty recycled cans can be made with the same energy needed to produce just one can created from virgin ore.  Some producers have expedited the process so that a new can made from recycled material is on the shelf in as little as 60 days.  Yet, our recycling rate for aluminum cans is only 51.1%.

While it may be easy to look at this from a glass-half-full perspective, the Container Recycling Institute recently published an article proving we’re not doing enough.  Americans throw 1,500 aluminum cans in the trash every second.  That’s every second of every minute of every day.  So, during the 90 seconds it will take you to read this article, 135,000 cans were discarded to a landfill. If you were to total all the aluminum from America’s trashed cans for a year it would be enough to make 8,000 747’s.

The bottom line is simple.  For the green movement to be successful everybody has got to get involved in even the simplest of activities like recycling.  It is inexcusable in a country of our knowledge and wealth that we allow enough aluminum to build 8000 planes to get diverted into a landfill every year.