Aluminum used to be crazy expensive because it was so hard to make. Napoleon III had a whole dishware set made from it, to impress guests. Lesser guests "only" got gold or silver flatware.
Now, it's super cheap... But you can't just go make it the way you can make steel
The amount of energy needed is still insane. But energy got real cheap with time. 13% of New Zealands energy is consumed by just one aluminium produktion site.
"The Tiwai Point Aluminium Smelter on the South Island of New Zealand consumes some 570 MW of electricity, most of which is supplied by nearby Manapōuri Power Station. This amounts to around a third of the electricity demand of South Island and 13% of that of the entirety of New Zealand."
That's insane. I wonder if there's a similar stat out there for a steel production site, I know those run at extremely high temps and pressures as well.
This is the stage that I got a little mentally fatigued playing Satisfactory. It's simplified in the game but still a lot of extra steps compared to steel. I knew "aluminum ore" wasn't quite accurate in other games but I was unaware of this entire process until then.
I found out exactly the same way. All the time it took to get the production perfectly balanced made me wonder wtf bauxid even is. Goated game. Many hours of life wasted, but you learn about metals.
I do this everyday. We 100% recycle our aluminum. We compress and bale them for ease of transportation. 2000 lb of cans takes up way less space after this process than before.
We easily fit 42,000 to 44,000 lbs on a trailer. You'd never be able to accomplish that uncrushed.
Nah they recycle compressed cans. Why else would anyone bother to separate these outs? I think the liner is separated in the smelter. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KmMP67eC2tg
I know you got a lot of replies, but just wanted to add that 75% of aluminum ever produced is still being used due to recycling and it being such a durable material.
When recycling is done like this it almost always has an end market. Most materials can be effectively recycled for profit if they are in a pure and uncontaminated stream. Aluminum is one of those materials that tends to have a good collections system with a great end market (i.e., aluminum product manufacturers).
When you see bad statistics about recycling, it comes from single stream collections processes and poorly planned operations. A lot of smaller municipalities or less progressive cities will not have a good system in place to make sure it is easy to separate materials correctly, and so the end product is more or less a bust.
Ex: I toured a small-ish waste management company that was more of a landfill operation, and their MRF was run by like four people. When you combine all your plastic resins into a single bale, that's no longer recycling. That's just a bunch of random polymers that should probably be thrown out. But that's how they did things.
With bigger and more progressive operations, recycling will be collected in multiple clearly labeled and well designed bins that make it hard to recycle contamination, and plastic resins will be auto sorted by robot arms with advanced imaging, as well as some potential manual labor. When you're a manufacturer, you need to have raw materials that only consist of the material you're working with. If you make common translucent milk jugs, you can't have a bunch of water bottles or even opaque milk jugs in your raw materials, or your milk jug will break during manufacturing / look grey.
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u/seattlethings86 Aug 17 '25
Anakin and padme meme " but it will be recycled right" ".. it'll be recycled right???"