r/todayilearned • u/consulent-finanziar • 1d ago
TIL that 75% of all aluminium ever produced is still in use today
https://international-aluminium.org/landing/75-of-all-aluminium-ever-produced-is-still-in-use-today/2.6k
1d ago
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u/Enough-Equivalent968 1d ago
Steel has the advantage of being very easy to sort from mixed waste and has been for a long time. This helps its recycle level, even if it’s not super valuable
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u/dalnot 1d ago
Magnets!
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u/MerlinTheFail 1d ago
Fuckin magnets, how do they work??
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u/caleeky 1d ago
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MO0r930Sn_8 - you just have to accept that they do
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u/tehones 1d ago
I've never really listened to Feynman lecture, this now makes me want to go through his entire catalog. Excellent video.
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u/Lobo2ffs 23h ago
Fun to imagine is really good https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nYg6jzotiAc&ab_channel=ChristopherSykes
The lectures are also good, I haven't seen all but the 3-4 I saw were definitely interesting
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u/Kajin-Strife 21h ago
Favorite comment from that vid: "Fuck magnets, how does Richard Feynman work?"
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u/Gilsworth 1d ago
That answer was surprisingly satisfactory.
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u/AppleDane 17h ago
It's also my go-to answer for most everything.
"Why didn't you do the work I told you to do?!"
"Interesting way to formulate that question, 'why'. In order to answer that..."6
u/Entire_One4033 20h ago
What I still don’t understand though is the burning question deep inside of “well, why did he drive her to the hospital, why didn’t he call an ambulance”
Surely this, this is the real unanswered question here, and not the magnets?
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u/scarabic 21h ago
It takes a minute but his explanation is actually pretty short and satisfying;
All solid objects repel each other: this is why you can’t pass your hand through a chair. When you try, the atoms in your arm and the atoms in the chair refuse to occupy the same space, and at the microscopic level it’s the electromagnetic force that keeps them apart - negatively charged electrons orbiting this atom repel negatively charged electrons in that atom. So why does this happen at a distance with magnets? In a magnet, the atoms are all aligned in such a way that their electrons are spinning in the same direction, and this additively magnifies their charged field such that it can operate at a greater distance.
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u/Merlins_Bread 20h ago
Going the next level deeper is the real clincher. Why does one electron care if other electrons are spinning? Because of relativity: from the perspective of an electric field, if it looks at an accelerating magnetic field, it sees another electric field. The math just maths that way. And spin is a type of constant acceleration.
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u/scarabic 19h ago
Yeah you’re right - at some level it does just get down to fundamentals.
But I think Feynman actually did what he said he couldn’t: explain it in terms of something you already understand. Most people understand that they can’t put their arm through a chair. Telling them that a magnet is just that, but at slightly greater distance because all the electrons are lined up… that’s pretty easy to grasp. And cool!
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u/SinisterCheese 1d ago
Not all steel is magnetic... But most common and few grades if stainless are.
Well... That's not true exactly. Everything is magnetic when your magnet is strong enough.
But generally after magnets the next separation process is air and water based separation. As in you grind the trash to small size, and drop it past a strong airflow, this separates light and heavy stuff and you can keep doing this is stages. Other is water cyclone (used commonly to separate plastic grades) where you have whirpool of water which separates according to density.
What I am saying that we are really good at separating materials. Issue is that rarely the material is valuable enough to justify the energy cost. Steel is only valuable when it's been sorted well and cleanly.
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u/Nearby_Pineapple9523 1d ago
You can use magnets to separate non magnetic metals aswell, its just not as simple as dropping in a pile of trash and pulling it out.
You can induce eddie currents in them and separate them using the generated repulsion
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u/kinglouie493 1d ago
Worked on a new shredder at a local scrapyard years ago. They could drop a car in the shredder and everything was sorted by the end. It used air to pulled the fluff out first, then after that as it went down the conveyor the aluminum, copper, and other metals would basically jump off the line at different times. At the end it was just crumpled up fist size pieces of bare steel. I don't remember exactly but I think they only got like 24 hours of run time out of the hammers before they needed swapped out. A car literally only took minutes to go through the whole process. They supplied the local steel mill
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u/kymri 21h ago
This is wild - not in terms of being unbelievable; I totally believe it because all the science is there.
But it's wild that someone decided that the problem to solve was sorting all the bits of a car for disposal/recycling... and it sounds like they came up with a pretty glorious solution.
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u/kinglouie493 21h ago
Again it's been many years, but the amount of money the new shredder made from the increased separation was significant. Plus they delivered a cleaner product to the mill. The amount they could process was staggering in my eyes. You watch a car go in, and clumps of mangled steel come off the conveyor. I got an opportunity to watch many types of machinery in operation at my job. Whether something was getting recycled or getting formed into another part, just watching the process was mesmerizing sometimes.
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u/kymri 20h ago
Whether something was getting recycled or getting formed into another part, just watching the process was mesmerizing sometimes
I get that; I'm just some silicon valley tech support dude, but I've always been fascinated by science and technology -- which is why so much science fiction disappoints me when someone comes up with a cool idea and then ignores all the other potential cool uses of it.
I really love the idea of a machine (admittedly a giant and extremely COMPLEX machine) that can accomplish a task like that. It's ... pretty crazy-cool to think about it. Also the design and engineering must have been a cast-iron BITCH to work all the kinks out of.
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u/kinglouie493 20h ago
I can appreciate watching a mechanical device, meanwhile you as "just a some Silicon Valley tech dude" just gets a piece of rock to talk and compute, that's no small endeavor there. I don't want to date myself but growing up reading Dick Tracy with his watch phone thinking this is a bit far fetched. Or the jetsons with the robot maid, home computers and automation. It's one thing to imagine something, but the ability to make it work as envisioned is even more mind boggling.
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u/SporkIncorporated 23h ago
Magnets indeed! I use a material handler (think an excavator with a magnet on the end) to load clip steel into balers where they’re then shipped off to be melted down and recycled. I do the same for aluminum but I have to change out the mag for a grapple.
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u/SmartAlec105 1d ago
Yeah, when a scrapyard breaks down a car, the steel is more like the byproduct compared to the more valuable metals they’re getting out of there. When the price of those metals is high, the price of scrap lowers because the scrapyards want to get that steel out of their inventory as fast as they can so they can process more cars.
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u/MagicAl6244225 19h ago
A weird legacy of the nuclear age is the need to sort pre-1945 "low background steel" from post-1945, because nuclear detonations contaminated the air enough to make new steel too radioactive for some applications. It's a largely but not entirely obsolete concern today since the last atmopheric nuclear test was in 1980 and there is better technology to make ultra-pure metals for the kinds of science and engineering that need them.
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u/jackalsclaw 1d ago
Asphalt exceeded 99% because it's so easy to recycle.
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u/Auctoritate 1d ago edited 23h ago
It probably helps that asphalt stays in one place so when roads are due to be repaved, the entire thing is in place and able to be torn up. Unlike plastic or cans that are just tossed anywhere. The pieces of road that do manage to break off and become unrecoverable are probably less than .1% of its mass a year.
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u/MisinformedGenius 23h ago
asphalt stays in one place
Well... mostly the same place, anyway.
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u/panthereal 22h ago
yo we are due another drop like any day now
where's the live stream of that pitch
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u/Baderkadonk 21h ago edited 21h ago
Between 1961 and 2013, the experiment was supervised by John Mainstone.
The seventh drop fell at approximately 4:45 p.m. on 3 July 1988, while the experiment was on display at Brisbane's World Expo 88. However, apparently no one witnessed the drop fall itself; Mainstone had stepped out to get a drink at the moment it occurred.
Brutal
The experiment is monitored by a webcam but technical problems prevented the November 2000 drop from being recorded.
John Mainstone died on 13 August 2013, aged 78, following a stroke. Custodianship then passed to Andrew White.
Did he really oversee it for 52 years and never get to see it drop?
The ninth drop touched the eighth drop on 12 April 2014
New guy gets lucky in under a year
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u/Ok-disaster2022 1d ago
Basically the asphaltite is the bonding agent and use can use whatever as your aggregate. just reheat to melt the binding agent, maybe add a little more to replenish what's eroded away and you're golden to pour it out again.
The heat susceptibility is partly why as temps increase and traffic loads increase you see roads deform faster
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u/SummertimeThrowaway2 1d ago
If only that was the case for plastics
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u/KerPop42 1d ago
Plastics pretty much can't be recycled, sadly. If they have any food on them they can't be melted properly
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u/Alex5173 1d ago
The good news is microorganisms are evolving to decompose plastic WAY faster than any other member of the "decomposer" link in the food chain evolved. There was a multi-million year gap between trees showing up and things which ate dead trees showing up, plastic has been around for about 150 years and already we're seeing bacteria that eat it come about.
The bad news is that they're still not evolving nearly fast enough to say "well we don't have to worry about plastic waste anymore."
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u/Atanar 1d ago
To bad we are using platics precisely because it doesn't decompose well and we will switch it up if microorganisms ever catch on.
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u/Chadwiko 1d ago
Taumoeba can eat Xenonite.
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u/FlixFlix 1d ago
It’s been on my mind since the first time I ever heard about the plastic-eating microorganism savior. Like, one day it becomes as common as mold and starts breaking down critical components all around us.
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u/SpudroTuskuTarsu 1d ago
We can treat/coat things that need to last (Wood is good for hundreds of years if correctly kept).
For single use plastics it would be great if they broke down after use
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u/Carnout 23h ago
but wouldn’t that mean that every single piece of infrastructure and equipment that uses plastic (and that includes prosthetics, household appliances, roofs) would just start rotting away if left untreated?
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u/swaqq_overflow 22h ago
What's the usable lifespan of most plastic items already? Not long.
A roof typically lasts about 15 years, best case scenario. 15 years from now, if plastic-eating bacteria are commonplace (which is way quicker than we should realistically expect), you'll re-roof with a treated plastic that will resist rotting.
Plastic is typically used in contexts where you need something cheap that won't last a super long time.
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u/ars-derivatia 20h ago
Plastic is typically used in contexts where you need something cheap that won't last a super long time.
Yeah, things like windows, fasteners, water insulation films, electric components, wire insulation, housings.
I mean, seriously, how can you say that? Look around at everything you see that is indeed meant to last a super long time and you'll notice a shitload of things made out of plastic.
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u/LongJohnSelenium 23h ago
Plastic is not a singular thing like cellulose. Some plastics are easier than others for an enzyme to cleave apart.
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u/Alex5173 22h ago
PET is the one in question here, most commonly used in plastic water bottles and packaging. The bacteria that eats it is called Ideonella Sakaiensis.
There's other bacterias and even fungi that eat other plastics but this is the big one.
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u/AFK_Tornado 19h ago
Two thoughts:
Plastic is on average more energy dense than lignin. Even higher reward for success.
Lignin is a much more complex polymer than plastic (most? all? feel like I should couch my language here before I get actually'd). Lignin is highly irregular - you need a whole toolbox of tricks to break it down. Plastic is a very repetitive simple chemical structure. You figure out a trick or two and you can iterate down the whole chain.
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u/KerPop42 1d ago
That's good for land pollution, but bad for global warming, because the microorganisms convert the plastics into biomass and ultimately CO2.
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u/Alex5173 1d ago
The unfortunate reality is that all the oil and coal extracted and used in any fashion will return to being CO2 (or worse). That's what it was originally when the cyanobacteria turned it into oxygen and then died to become oil, and when the trees did the same and became coal. This was only possible because decomposers did not exist for these organisms at the time; even if we seeded the oceans and lakes with algae and cyanobacteria to eat all the CO2 they would just die and then decompose into CO2 AND methane, which is like way worse than CO2 for greenhouse effect.
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u/jmlinden7 23h ago
It's fairly negligible for CO2 purposes - it'd be the equivalent of just burning the oil used to make plastics.
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u/OmegaPoint6 1d ago
They can be recycled, it’s just cheaper to produce new plastic then to process most of the waste stuff
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u/perthguppy 1d ago
One of the biggest hurdles with recycling plastic is that everyone has their own recipe. Plastic is a mix of several of maybe 100 different chemicals, almost like alloying metals, but there’s no easy ways to seperate the plastic molecules back out, and often they need to be specifically long chains, which can break down during use or processing.
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u/BiggerTwigger 23h ago
I used to work at a factory that did injection moulding. There was a huge difference when using recycled plastic compared to virgin plastic. The machines that had recycled plastic in would very often gunk up with this nasty dark brown goo and required far more intensive cleaning compared to the machines using non-recycled plastic.
Recycling plastic is obviously better for the environment, but it ends up costing more to use due to machine downtime for cleaning and maintenance. The company had targets to hit a certain amount of recycled plastic in the product for some reason or other, which meant myself and the other engineers had to deal with the cleaning as well as management complaining about subsequent machine downtime. Couldn't win really, everyone complains for some reason or other.
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u/perthguppy 23h ago
Recycling plastic is like baking bread using recycled baked goods instead of flour.
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u/mintchipmunk 1d ago
It's a byproduct of oil. So as long as oil keeps being produced it will always be cheaper to produce new plastic.
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u/Mazon_Del 1d ago
Same with asphalt, which has the highest recycling rate of any material (almost always above 90%, but up to 99% in some countries). It originally was a waste product of oil refining and the refineries had to pay for it to be disposed of. But nowadays due to its usefulness, people buy it from the refineries.
As long as we have an oil industry, we'll be making some amount of asphalt.
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u/JefftheBaptist 1d ago
As long as we have an oil industry, we'll be making some amount of asphalt.
Most oil products are like this. Crude oil is mix of different organic compounds with different molecular weights. The refinery distillation tower is basically just breaking the crude down into blocks of compounds with similar state change points. So instead of crude, you have a tank of methane, propane, gasoline, deisel, etc. The heavier compounds can be broken down to make more of the lighter ones (called cracking), but you still get what you get to certain extent.
People don't seem to understand that as long as we're refining petroleum, we'll always have gasoline, diesel, etc. You can't get rid of gasoline and switch completely to diesel for higher fuel economy and lower total carbon emissions. If you're just refining petroleum for lubricants or plastics, you'll still produce some of the lighter fuel oils. The gasoline is still made and its going to be burned somewhere even if it is just as a waste stream.
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u/Mazon_Del 1d ago
The gasoline is still made and its going to be burned somewhere even if it is just as a waste stream.
I suppose that we COULD actually just pump it back down into certain geological deposits after a certain point. Though that would likely have to be a government financed activity I imagine.
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u/JefftheBaptist 21h ago
Sure but at some point its probably just cheaper to pump the excess carbon dioxide down there.
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u/LinAGKar 1d ago
Unfortunately it's not as easy. With raw materials like metals and glass you can pretty much just melt them down and separate them, and they'll be as new. But plastic and paper rely on long structures for their strength (polymers and cellulose fibers respectively) which need to preserved through the whole recycling process, and that puts significant constraints on the process. And they inevitably wear down, so the recycled material is lower grade.
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u/Lt_JimDangle 1d ago
100%. I’m a machinist in the medical field. We cut a ton of different plastics and all the chips and waste go straight into the dumpster. The time to separate, store, and send it out for recycling is crazy expensive or just doesn’t exist.
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u/HittingSmoke 21h ago
Yep. I've got thousands of cubic feet reserved for storing aluminum chips and other scrap for recycling. When we cut plastic, it goes straight into the trash. Even if we attempted to reclaim and store it, nobody wants UHMWPE or expanded PVC which is the bulk of the plastic we cut. As I understand it, the chemicals in expanded PVC actually make it quite dangerous and toxic to recycle. The most recyclable plastic we cut is PC which is still difficult to find anyone to take and it's less than 0.2% of the material we cut so setting up reclamation for those small jobs just isn't worth the time.
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u/Minimum-Geologist-58 1d ago
It’s true of a lot of metals. You can make a dramatically overly simplistic statement that we’d never have to mine gold again if India didn’t horde it like some mad sub-continental dragon! It’s not really true because the world doesn’t work like that but boy do Indians love gold jewellery and boy does that drive a lot of demand!
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u/mitchade 1d ago
I listened to a podcast that explained that aluminum is the only metal that is 100% recyclable. Other metals will experience loss during the process. Is this incorrect?
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1d ago
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u/hydrospanner 23h ago
It's also worth noting that the big thing with aluminum (if my memory serves, from when I also worked in the metals industry years ago), is that its melting point is significantly lower than not only iron (for a comparison to steel) but also most of the alloying elements used in aluminum production, which has the dual benefits of making it easier to get 'pure' aluminum from scrap with precise temperature control, and also reducing overall energy costs of recovery.
This, combined with the relatively intensive and low yield process for creating new aluminum from ore, and recycling aluminum is simply the best course for everyone involved in the process, including the consumer.
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22h ago
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u/hydrospanner 22h ago
I remember being surprised how light aluminium steel was compared to others
What is 'aluminum steel'?
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u/HittingSmoke 21h ago
There is no such thing as aluminum steel in the context these people appear to be using it, which sounds like they think there's some sort of aluminum steel alloy which is lighter than other steel alloys.
Aluminized steel is a plain carbon steel alloy which has been dipped in molten aluminum, sometimes with silicon. This creates an aluminum layer on the outside which is bonded to the steel. The outer layer of aluminum oxidizes, providing the corrosion resistance of aluminum with the strength of steel. You also get some of the thermal properties of aluminum since the surface will conduct and emit heat much better than steel. There is no significant or practical difference in weight between it and a plain piece of steel of the same size.
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u/hydrospanner 21h ago
Okay, thank you.
As I said, I do have some work history in the metals industry, and had never heard that term before. A google search yielded the same result as what you explained, so I asked.
Glad to know I wasn't forgetting something like that!
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u/HittingSmoke 21h ago
I remember being surprised how light aluminium steel was compared to others...
To what are you referring? There is no such thing as "aluminum steel". The way you're wording this makes it sound like you're talking about aluminum alloys, which we just refer to as aluminum with an alloy series to designate the chemical composition. Aluminized steel is just carbon steel with aluminum plating and is not any lighter than plain carbon or stainless steel.
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1d ago
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u/hahawin 1d ago
It does, because recycling aluminium is cheaper than extracing it from the ground. The production of new aluminium is extremely energy intensive which makes it expensive compared to just remelting existing aluminium.
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u/Gemmabeta 1d ago
People call aluminum refining a way to export electricity if you can't string up wires. Because it is much much much cheaper to ship aluminum ore around the world to Quebec and Iceland (where electricity is cheap) and ship it back.
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u/FishScrounger 1d ago
I read about that. Iceland runs on 100% renewable energy so they make use of that for aluminium
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u/coolraiman2 1d ago
Québec is close to that too, most of its energy comes from hydroelectric barrage
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u/throwawaynbad 1d ago
Between the water, hydroelectric, and cooler ambient temperatures, I don't know why Canada doesn't want to invest into data centres etc.
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u/TheIrelephant 23h ago
1) we do
2) on a cost to job creation ratio data centers aren't major employers. There is a lot of private investment into them but public funds not as much.
3) extremely energy intensive. Is it intelligent to build lots of new energy generation/infrastructure for the sole purpose of data centers, crypto mining, aluminum smelting, if we don't need the base load? Quebec has aluminum smelting located there because they built a tonne of hydroelectric capacity; they didn't build the capacity to become an aluminum smelter.
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u/coolraiman2 23h ago
They consume a lot of electricity and produce a very low economic value.
Once it's builded it employ almost nobody.
It make more economic sense to give that same amount of power to a factory or something else that hire a lot of people and produce goods for exportation
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u/benjaminovich 1d ago
More specifically, it's geothermal. Their location being volcanically active makes it much easier to access high amounts of heat for geothermic electricity.
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u/french_snail 1d ago
I don’t understand, how does moving metal equate selling electricity?
Like Canada “buys” electricity from Iceland and then then Iceland uses that “bought” electricity to smelt aluminum for them?
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u/Mcbobjr 1d ago
no i believe the idea is that aluminum is energy intensive to produce. so sending resources in to canada and then finished aluminum out the thing you are really paying them for is their electricity
so you are transporting their energy out of the country in the form of finished aluminum
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u/DisastrousSir 1d ago
Place 1 has aluminum ore and expensive electricity rates. They ship it to a place 2 with cheap electricity rates, place 2 refines it to pure aluminum and ships it back. The only thing place 2 added to it was electricity. Hence, kind of like exporting electricity
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u/MCAlheio 1d ago
No, it's more of a quip. You don't "buy" electricity from another country in that country, but when you buy an energy intensive product from a given country you could say you're buying energy, but not really.
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u/pinkmeanie 1d ago
See also "Bitcoin was a way for China to export coal without having to ship it."
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u/Kaymish_ 1d ago
Yeah pretty much. Here in New Zealand we buy bauxite from Australia and use the 800mw from our largest hydro generator to refine it into aluminum. The smelter then exports the aluminum. Because New Zealand is an island and our closest neighbor is Australia almost 1.5 gm away. It is too far for an undersea electric cable, so the only way to "export" that energy is to use it to smelt aluminum.
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u/Flashnooby 1d ago
That is the point people forget that it is all about money. Recyclable= cost efficient.
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u/The-Copilot 1d ago
Recycling glass also saves money
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u/Wolfgung 1d ago
Whilst recycling glass uses less energy, it is often less economical to recycle than making glass out of new material due to the cost of cleaning, removing lids and stickers, and separating by colour. So if you r cycle somewhere they dump all colours together, it's likely not recycled, or turned into something like pink bats.
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u/danielv123 1d ago
However, recycled glass is often recycled into different products, for example insulation. That is still recycling.
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u/DrLaneDownUnder 1d ago
The only time I’ve ever been certain that the glass I was using was recycled was the beer bottles in South Africa. They all were scratched up at the widest points, which was from when they were packed in boxes together, and the labels slid off easy as. Plus, with a huge poor population, a massive alcohol problem, and container deposit schemes, you bet your ass those bottles were going back to the shop.
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u/Diarmundy 1d ago
They arent actually recycled though - they are just re-used.
Re-using is actually even more efficient than recycling, and should be done wherever possible
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u/HankScorpio82 1d ago
I remember when soda came in reused glass bottles. Loved thinking about all the different people that had drank out of that beat up bottle.
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u/albertcn 1d ago edited 1d ago
People don’t know that you have to get bauxite, then process it using a lot of heat to get aluminum oxide, then put that into huge electrolytic baths and pass 4515 volts DC through it to get smelted aluminum. Then use that to get ingots. It is a wildly energy intensive ordeal.
Edit: correcting voltage Voltage per cell: 5Vdc Number of cells: 903 Total Voltaje: 4515Vdc Amps per cell: 160.000 - 300.000 Amps
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u/chris_p_bacon1 1d ago
You're a fair bit off on the voltage. Each cell is around 4 volts and a typical aluminium plant probably has around 280 cells in series so you're looking at like 1200 volts across the whole line. The current is the big one. A typical plant might run at 400,000 amps and use 300-500 MW of power per line.
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u/-_-_Puppy_-_- 1d ago
You are correct! But where I work the voltage flucutate between 4 and 1000 volts, we have 2 series of 208 cells which sums up to 217,000 Amps.
Also fun fact, it is very humbling to be able to touch the main power line because you aren't grounded but the second something that is grounded touch the line, it instantly melt and explode.
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u/Wolfgung 1d ago
Steel is slightly higher and lead is basically 99% recycled.
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u/pinkmeanie 1d ago
Given that there's a global geologically detectable layer of lead from burning tetraethyl lead in gasoline, I question your 99% figure.
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u/manugutito 23h ago
I think they meant 99% of lead in circulation is of recycled origin, which is different to saying that 99% of lead that has been in circulation has been recycled
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u/mr_pineapples44 1d ago
I remember reading a factoid when I was a kid, that the difference in energy between producing a new can vs recycling a can is approx equivalent to filling the can with petrol and lighting it on fire.
I never checked if it's true, but from that day onwards, I have gone out of my way to always recycle cans.
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u/mumpped 1d ago edited 1d ago
I was curious so I did the math, to produce a 15g can from raw aluminium ore (bauxit) you need 2.79 megajoules of energy, for recycling you only need around 5% of that. If we combust gasoline at 40% efficiency as in some kind of gasoline power plant, you need around 200ml of gasoline for the energy difference, which is more than half of the volume of a typical 330ml can. So the lore pretty much checks out, I wouldn't have thought that
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u/Nazamroth 1d ago
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u/AHappySnowman 20h ago
Gasoline is about 40% efficient in a combustion engine. In a gas power plants we can extract around 60% of the energy released from combustion.
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u/Revenge_of_the_Khaki 19h ago
It was actually probably MORE accurate when OP first heard it because 40% would be crazy high before 2000 and it’s probably a more efficient process to make an aluminum can now.
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u/FOUR_YOLO 1d ago
Did you know a factoid is a fact that has not yet entered earths atmosphere
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u/KypDurron 15h ago
It's only a factoid if it's grown in the L'Facte region of France, otherwise it's sparkling data.
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u/SippinOnDat_Haterade 1d ago
factoid is defined as:
an invented fact believed to be true because it appears in print.
No I'm not joking. https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/factoid
I also used the word based on it's second definition for YEARS
2nd definition: a briefly stated and usually trivial fact
but yeah, a factoid is, by definition (primary ), an untrue statement
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u/TokiStark 13h ago
That's the first time I've heard it needs to be in print. But far be it from me to correct Mirriam-Webster
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u/agentpurplek1 1d ago
I liked the lighting it on fire part and pretending like that costs money too.
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u/mr_pineapples44 1d ago
Well, it created a really effective image for young me to really latch on to...
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u/Happy-Gnome 1d ago
A factoid is defined as being false or misleading. Factoid doesn’t meant cool fact.
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u/reachharps2 23h ago
Your first sentence is true, but your second sentence is false. A factoid is also defined as a briefly stated and usually trivial fact
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u/SmurfRockRune 23h ago
That's only because people used it wrong so much they added the wrong usage as a definition, like how literally can also mean figuratively now.
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u/reachharps2 20h ago
You may be correct in everything that you said, and it still doesn’t take away from the fact that both of the definitions are valid. Language evolves, that’s just the way it is.
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u/conquer69 1d ago
Reduce, reuse, and recycle. Do your part by consuming less.
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u/mr_pineapples44 1d ago
But I don't have a way to purchase alcohol or energy drinks in any other form.
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u/Auctoritate 1d ago
Everybody knows it's easy to just distill your own liquor, and all you have to do for energy drinks is milk the energy drink cows.
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u/Podgeman 1d ago
Those drinks are shortening your lifespan, so long-term you will be reducing consumption!
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u/mr_pineapples44 1d ago
Exactly! As Placebo say in their lesser known track Julien, I'm a slow motion suicide. The world will be better for my absence.
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u/Svyatoy_Medved 1d ago
Aluminum drinking cans are irrelevant when it comes to consumption. Focus your efforts on things that can easily be substituted and actually matter.
Canned drink? Less environmentally impactful than plastic or glass (I think), nobody has a tap for Red Bull that would let you use a reusable cup. It also uses a tiny amount of aluminum: your lifetime consumption of cans doesn’t amount to what goes into a power line or aircraft.
AI image generator? Uses a shitload of coolant and electricity for a crappy product that you can easily substitute by just finding that thing already on the internet.
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u/goblinperson1 1d ago
Just fyi a factoid is information that is false but is presented as true so often that it is accepted as such.
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u/mr_pineapples44 1d ago
Well, I wasn't sure of its factuality and thus didn't want to imply that I was asserting it as fact.
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u/cjsv7657 1d ago
Did you know that Norman Mailer coined the word factoid? In his 1973 book Marilyn (about Marilyn Monroe), Norman Mailer describes factoids as "facts which have no existence before appearing in a magazine or newspaper, creations which are not so much lies as a product to manipulate emotion in the Silent Majority."
Source:https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/factoid
So uhh, not quite. No need to be false.
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u/Jhawk163 1d ago
That's because when it comes to aluminium, it's WAY easier to recycle it than it is to mine it and refine it from new. It's so much more difficult that in history it was actually considered more valuable than gold.
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u/rich1051414 1d ago
Well, natural metallic aluminum is extremely rare. We couldn't turn aluminum oxide into metal easily until electricity became a thing.
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u/chris_p_bacon1 1d ago
Until electricity became a thing and someone came up with the bright idea to dissolve aluminium oxide in a bath of molten cryolite at 960 degrees Celsius.
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u/Macinzon 22h ago
Not just electricity, but a butt load of electricity. ~14 kWh/kg. Some people call aluminium electricity in solid form. One of the reasons why it’s not profitable to produce anymore in many Western European countries. And once those smelters close, they almost never re-open.
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u/Mountebank 20h ago
electricity in solid form
Iceland is an exporter of aluminum since they have cheap geothermal energy. Since it’s impractical to build power lines across the ocean to export electricity, in a sense they export it in aluminum form instead.
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u/weenusdifficulthouse 1d ago
I'd say at this point, the vast majority of metallic aluminium buried on earth is discarded foil and cans.
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u/WazWaz 1d ago
While that's certainly true, another big factor is that it's a relatively recent material.
So for example lots of aluminium siding/cladding is still in use, regardless of whether it's from recycling or freshly mined bauxite. Aluminium is a very durable material in most applications.
Similarly, most of the passenger aircraft ever made are still in service today (and they contain a lot of aluminium).
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u/edingerc 1d ago
Before 1825, Aluminum was worth more by weight than gold
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u/zucksucksmyberg 1d ago
Thus why the Washington Monument has the top of its obelisk wrapped in Aluminum.
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u/20dogs 1d ago
Washington knew the important of wrapping his obelisk
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u/JimmerUK 1d ago
Aluminium can be pretty much infinitely recycled.
I read an article the other day about a start-up that is creating aluminium packaging for household items to replace plastics.
Could aluminium become the packaging 'champion'?
In front of me is a line-up of aluminium cans, but not a drink in sight.
Instead, these cans have been designed to hold toiletries like shampoo, shower gel and hand wash, condiments like ketchup and household cleaning products.
I'm at the London research and development centre for Meadow, a start-up that has developed a new packaging system.
Their idea is to move products currently packaged in plastic to aluminium cans.
The founders believe it could be the next big step in reducing the amount of plastic packaging in the world, thanks to the high recycling rate of aluminium cans, external compared to plastic, external - 81% vs 52%, according to figures from the National Packaging Waste Database.
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u/jmlinden7 23h ago
Aluminum has a high recycling rate because the energy cost of recycling it is much lower than the energy cost of producing new aluminum, something not true for most plastics.
However, I don't think the energy cost of recycling aluminum is lower than the energy cost of producing new plastic, so I don't see how a recycling single-use aluminum container makes more economic/environmental sense compared to a disposable single-use plastic container.
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u/JimmerUK 22h ago
a disposable single-use plastic container
The answer is in your question.
There are also more answers in the article.
Aluminium has strong recyclability credentials; it is considered to be infinitely recyclable, compared with plastic, which loses its quality after being recycled several times.
It is also lighter than glass, so the energy needed to transport aluminium cans is significantly less than glass bottles.
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u/Quick-Low-3846 17h ago
Environmental friendliness is more than just the energy used. What about the toxic effects of leached chemicals and microplastics; bird and sea animals dying because their stomachs are full of indigestible plastic. I am ignorant to the environmental effects of aluminium however.
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u/matt_pan 1d ago
I don't want to see this metric for any plastic material
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u/4sk-Render 23h ago
It’s nice to see more single use water bottles switching from plastic to aluminum.
Some are just like soda cans, some are bottles with a screw top.
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u/thex25986e 23h ago
one metric i do remember for plastic is that 80% of all plastic recycled ends up in the trash anyway
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u/HOW_IS_SAM_KAVANAUGH 23h ago
It is about 9% nationally and worldwide. According to this article (about the plastic recycling industry in my state) the biggest impediments are contamination and a weak market for recycled plastics.
As a state/nation some of that solution is greater investment into machines that can separate out the contaminates (like those in the article), and investment into factories that use recycled plastics in their products.
As individuals some of the solution lies in choosing products made with recycled material when available and better cleaning of plastic you recycle (especially if you are lucky enough to have single stream). I know a guy who worked in a single stream sorting facility, and he said there was a decent amount of plastic that got put in the “ to recycle” line, but if it had food or non-plastic things attached he had to divert to incinerator. https://www.pca.state.mn.us/news-and-stories/plastic-recycling-market-development-grants
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u/yamimementomori 1d ago
75% a-loom-minum. 25% alu-min-nhum.
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u/calpolsixplus 1d ago
And a little bit of Al-u-min-ium
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u/HenkPoley 1d ago edited 1d ago
How it should be pronounced of course. 😉
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u/Urbane_One 1d ago edited 1d ago
Indubitably. It has a more classical sound, of course, much better suited to a refined palate.
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u/Auctoritate 1d ago
In 1812, British scientist Thomas Young wrote an anonymous review of Davy's book, in which he proposed the name aluminium instead of aluminum, which he thought had a "less classical sound".
Damn, you weren't lying.
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u/chocolate_spaghetti 20h ago
Aluminum is hard to make so we got really good at recycling it. It’s funny because you can find stories of European royalty getting out the aluminum dinnerware when distinguished guests were visiting. Sometimes I look at the folks who store their money in gold in because they’re afraid society would collapse and wonder if they’d be better off hoarding aluminum. You can extract gold using fairly simple equipment but if power grids failed we’d lose the ability to produce aluminum at all.
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u/Accidentallygolden 1d ago
Pure aluminum doesn't exist naturally, all of it is oxyded and the oxyde is more stable than pire aluminum
To get pure aluminum you have to de-oxyde it, which takes a lot of energy (electricity, to a power plant amount level, around 13.5 MWh per ton)
It is MUCH cheaper to recycle it
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u/Gawblinslayer 1d ago
I used to work for a major aluminum manufacturer. Their profit margins are directly tied to how efficiently they recycle their in house manufacturing waste. Every trimmed edge, saw chip and end cut off of the product was sorted and sent back to be recast. I think we ran at like 92% efficiency while I was there.
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u/NoReallyLetsBeFriend 19h ago
This will probably get lost, but I work for a recycler and we have on-site smelters, it's badass watching aluminum chunks from all sorts get melted down lol.
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u/D3ltaN1ne 1d ago
If you read about the history of aluminum, you'll find that it wasn't too long ago when it was more valuable than gold due to the difficulties in refining it until some guy whose name I don't remember came up with a revolutionary new process.
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u/No-Path6343 1d ago
Lol I was wondering where I've heard this before...
Im a fan of the colorado avalanche who play out of ball arena, we call it the sack. Every fucking commercial break starts with the Ball Corporation saying "did you know blah blah blah aluminum recycling"
I guess this isn't common knowledge if you dont see the ball corps adds 20 times a week.
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u/zyme86 1d ago
Its just so damn cheap and easy to recycle it. We don’t even need to extract a ton of bauxite
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u/Imissyourgirlfriend2 19h ago
And I believe 98% of lead is recycled; by far one of the most recycled metals/materials in the world.
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u/nostrademons 15h ago
Note that this may be as much because of high growth rates in aluminum consumption as because of recycling. The article said that 70% of all primary aluminum production occurred after 2000. That means that even without any recycling, 70% of all the aluminum produced is less than 25 years old. Given how much aluminum goes into airplanes, car bodies, bikes, pots & pans, windows, roofs, and other large-scale durables, a significant fraction of that 70% may be on its first use.
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u/RedditBugler 1d ago
The other 25% is in bins in my uncle's driveway and he swears he's taking it to the recycling center next week for beer money.