[grabby]

Recycling 1 ton of aluminum saves the equivalent in energy of 2,350 gallons of gasoline. This is equivalent to the amount of electricity used by the typical home over a period of 10 years.


One recycled aluminum can saves enough electricity to operate a TV for three hours.


Using recycled aluminum beverage cans to produce new cans allows the aluminum can industry to make up to 20 times more cans for the same amount of energy.

one pound aluminum equal a gallon of gas in power usage.

ALUMINUM is the epitomy of waste and largess.

Aluminum will become very expensive soon.

In 1900 before electrolysis, an ounce of aluminum cost 10 times what an ounce of Gold cost.

Chemically, it is almost impossible to manufacture, you have to have electric power.

[MattSavinar]

This is why I have all my assets invested in recyclable cans.

Best,

Matt

[MattSavinar]

Actually, all joking aside I suspect one of the few industries to survive into the post-peak world will be recycling. For those of you mulling over "what careers/jobs/businesses should I look into", I found the following on google. Sure there are more like it out there:

http://www.p2pays.org/rbac/

Best,

Matt

[Guest]

Actually, all joking aside I suspect one of the few industries to survive into the post-peak world will be recycling. For those of you mulling over "what careers/jobs/businesses should I look into", I found the following on google. Sure there are more like it out there:

http://www.p2pays.org/rbac/

Best,

Matt

No thank you. I would rather go long on commodities and cash out when tshtf. Going over someone's trash is not my cup of tea.

Cheers,

[tdrive]

That above was me. Wonder why I have to relog sometimes twice. Weird.

Cheers,

[Dezakin]

Aluminum will become very expensive soon.

This doesnt follow. Peak oil has only tangental effects on electricity supply given that we produce hardly any electricity at all from oil.

Chemically, it is almost impossible to manufacture, you have to have electric power

Fortunately electric power is cheap and is likely to remain so for centuries.

[Dukat_Reloaded]

Aluminum was more expensive than gold because people did not know how to get it out of the ore, only the free formed Aluminum was mined and it was very rare until someone learn't how to extract it from the ore.

[smallpoxgirl]

One recycled aluminum can saves enough electricity to operate a TV for three hours.

You know what saves even more electricity? Not drinking from disposable containers.

In general I'm pretty skeptical about recycling. Our problem is that we are obsessed w/ consumption. It's not that we need to perfect our methods of consumption, it's that we need to stop consuming. Recycling, IMHO, is generally just a way for people to dodge the moral impact of their destructive consumption. "I'm drinking water that was shipped a thousand miles to get to my house wasting huge amounts of energy. As long as I recycle the bottle, I don't have to feel bad."

It's reduce, reuse, recycle. Recycling is worse than useless if you forget the first two steps.

[dooberheim]

I've watched the demise of reusable containers over the last thirty years with sadness.

Recycling as practiced in most American cities these days wastes more energy than it saves. Only aluminum is worth recycling when one factors in the energy costs to sort, bale, and transport the other materials to a reuse facility. It would be better to burn one's paper and plastic (in an efficient incinerator or heater) to heat the house and simply take in one's cans ever now and then. And whatever happened to returnable bottles? Milk, soda and beer bottles are so much better reused than recycled - surely returning a load of cases via train saves more energy than melting them down and making new, right?

DK

[Kingcoal]

This brings up a point that has always erked me. What alot of people call recycling is actually remanufacturing. Prior to the disposable age, people brought their own containers to the store and filled them. Perhaps peak oil will bring back that practice.

[backstop]

In the interest of recycling back in the '80s, a bunch of UK environmentalists (FOE) mounted a campaign targeting businesses' usage of new paper.

Since Thatcher was at the time donning a Green headscarf, the campaign was supported by business, and recycled paper gained some serious market share.

The largest papermilll in S. UK, at Sittingbourne in Kent, thus decided to end its timber purchase and go over to recycling paper only.

Great News ? For who ? For FOE membership maybe, but no one else.

The 100,000 tonnes /yr of timber Sittingbourne terminated was grown in Coppice Woodlands across Kent, and in losing its market, they've lost their viability and are being plowed up or left to go derelict, with no youngsters being trained on in their forestry skills.

Those coppices were Britain's most ancient sustainable production industry.

STUFF the idiocy of urbocentric recyclists where the sun don't shine !!!

regards,

Backstop

[EnergySpin]

The sad statistic is that people who watch TV drink beer contained in aluminum cans. Turning off the TV and not drinking the pop/beer could have significant gains for the environment, one's waist and brain.

[dooberheim]

I love Yuengling - my family lives in Tampa, Florida, and when I go there I pick some up. They bought the old Schlitz plant there - a good use of it in my book.

When I moved here we had returnables (beer) from Busch, Miller and Huber (Wisconsin). All have since discontinued selling beer in returnable bottles. Shame. I haven't seen a returnable milk container since 1963 or so. We had returnable pop bottles here until about 1998, again, what's the problem? You make the stuff here, refill them here, you don't need to buy new containers!!!

I think some of this is fear of liability - some slick lawyer would sue Pepsi for giving his client AIDS or something like that. Some people have to find a USEFUL profession.

DK

[coyote]

Aluminum will become very expensive soon.

This doesnt follow. Peak oil has only tangental effects on electricity supply given that we produce hardly any electricity at all from oil.

Chemically, it is almost impossible to manufacture, you have to have electric power

Fortunately electric power is cheap and is likely to remain so for centuries.

Unfortunately, a lot of out electricity is produced from natural gas and coal, which are also nonrenewable fuels, and are also showing signs of faltering, especially NG. And, of course, more of those fuels will be pulled aside to make up for shortfalls in oil supply... No, after Peak Oil electricity will not remain cheap for many years, let alone centuries.

[dbuckley]

No, after Peak Oil electricity will not remain cheap for many years, let alone centuries.

The whole economics of aluminium production is predicated on (very) cheap electricity.

Here in NZ we have the Cromalco smelter, which runs on clean, green, 100% hydro generated electricity. The deal to get Cromalco here was done many years ago, when NZ was 100% hydro electricity.

Times change, of course, and now total renewables now make up 70% of our electricity, the rest being NG and coal. Comalco are looking fo another good long-term deal giving them cheap electricity, in a country (...world) that is facing increasing energy costs.

NZ is torn - we'd like to see the back of Cromalco, they use 15% of all our electricity, so getting that power back would make a big difference to our thermal generation needs. But losing Cromalco would mean the end of lots of jobs (effectively the dessimation of a region, a bit like what happened to mining villages in Wales), and loss of foreign income and tax.

[Dukat_Reloaded]

It's quite pathetic how all the drink containers were made out of glass and recycled earlier to now where nothing is reused. Convenience is what has fueled this massive uptake of disposable products, infact convenience is still making inroads into every corner of our lives, until oil runs out, our lives will become more and more convenient until the system topples over itself. I still perfer plastic bottles over glass, I believe glass bottles are dangerous, where ever I look there is a smashed bottle somewhere, animals, humans, cars and bikes all suffer when moving over broken glass, and our Australian bush is absoultly littered with glass and broken bottles which causes bush fires on hot days