The world consumes a mind blowing 4 billion cans of soft drinks made of recycled aluminium every week. DCODE how they are recycled. #DCODE, #HowDoTheyDoIt, #AluminiumCans
@@elcabezon5487 Titanium is heavier, way more expensive and way harder to work with. Most rocket bodies do indeed use aluminum, although it is often alloyed with other metals such as Lithium as with the Falcon 9.
@@josephlalock8378 Correct, like in Shakespeare's king Lar. This particular mispronunciation drives me nuts, BTW. Especially when I hear New-Que-Lar engineers say it.
I live less than half a mile from the recycling plant and wondered how they did it. It's quite common to see 4 trucks a day with an ingot pass my house, that's a lot of cans.
You should see the ingot. The one I work at sometimes actually make the ingot using a water cooled shaper. And it goes 55 feet into the ground. It's a sight when they pull it out with a crane just holding it from the end. The ingots are molten inside for days.
Back when I was a broke high schooler in Michigan, we would find cans and return them so we could put $5 worth of gas into our junk cars. The freedom was real.
Oh yeah I remember when five of us would pitch in a toonie each and we'd have enough gas to get to Wonderland and back. At 70 cents a litre, I got almost half a tank in my 87 Escort.
@@bobmizen1 DUDE!!! I was going to mention how Grant Imahara used "olympic sized swimming ppols" as a measure of DISTANCE on pumpkin chuckin'!! ( I now use it as a measure of intelligences, " I am olympic sized swimming pools smarter than anybody who works in the mcdonalds"!
Old timers like me can remember when beverage cans were in transition to the all aluminum cans we have today. A half-century ago, PSAs for aluminum can recycling had to specify the desired cans had a concave bottom and no side seam, which was composed of ferrous metal.
Feels pretty cool to say ive work frequently at one of these plants in the US. Doing repairs and all the nasty work you never get to see. Water pumps, giant stainless steel belts, piping, 2000hp electric motor swaps, everything you can think of. But dear god is it miserable sometimes. Sometimes its so hot your boots melt into the grating on the floors. Give you superb gripping though lol.
Pretty sure with all the parties that I've thrown and the beer that I've drank myself in my life that I have personally contributed to at least one entire rocket ship.
Cans and bottles and basic "town" crap ended up along the county road which split my Iowa farm. One nice autumn day in 1977, having consumed too much (actually, as it turned out, it was the right amount) cold beer with a couple of neighboring farmers, I began to rant about all the crap along my land frontage. One farmer jokingly suggested that I call my congressman. Everyone laughed but me. So, I grab my phone, call information to find out my congressman's number, and actually him to give him Hell. I suggested at least a 5-cent charge like the old "pop" bottles back in the day. What happens next? Iowa begins to charge a nickel per bottle or can. The pragmatic, no change, no progressive Conservatives blew a head gasket. But, the law prevailed. Recycling came into being in Iowa just because some half-drunk Iowa farmers called a congressman (Well, actually I called). So, sue me.
Well done, Michael! I salute you and thank your younger self for rising to the challenge and springing into action. Most admirable! I think that any patch of this planet - _"The only home we've ever known,"_ in the words of the late, great Carl Sagan - that is taken care of or cleaned up in some way, benefits the whole world; and conversely, negatively impacts everyone directly and indirectly in subtle, unseen ways when any area is polluted, neglected or mismanaged.
I also paused the video at this point, but I was more trying to figure out what caused it to vaporize, they're not in the foundry yet. It's like a sentence or two just got cut from the script and no one noticed
Yea thats crazy how that works.... I told a joke about how to get a 🐕 to quit humping you leg at work the other day and that night win I got on RU-vid their was videos that poped up that went with the answer
I remember in Charlotte there was a one cent per can machine where you could recycle these cans. It was only for aluminum cans if there had a steel pop top you had to rake it off first for the machine to take it. That was the good old days us kids would walk along the roadside and pick up cans. We could make several bucks a day,
Used to do that with glass bottles. Walk along the beach in the evening pick up the bottles and take them back. Belgium still does it. The deposit on the bottle is more expensive than the beer. :-)
There are stores up here in Massachusetts that u take ur aluminum cans and plastic and glass bottles to to recycle them. You get a piece of paper that gives you money back for recycling ur bottles and cans.
I still do that now! I scrap all metal that I can find. Copper is the most valuable common metal but it's rare when going scrapping on the streets(well insulated wire is common but doesn't have a lot, not worth stripping). Aluminum though is very common. Entire ditches will be full with cans
@@weakmill103 as a equipment mechanic for a metal recycling facility the JD loader has AC with filtered air in a closed cab. He is fine behind that nice long scraper. The other guys they are hit as fuck.
When I was young, we were poor. Picking up trash to sell are one of my ways to do a past time. I am happy and consider myself lucky when I see aluminum cans along the road or garden bushes. It can be sold at higher penny comparing than iron or used white papers. By the way, I prefer saying a-loo-me-noom. LOL.
A HS because when I was 12 years old I used to cut wood and sell it to markets for them to burn for heat and this is here in the USA I used to clean snow I started working at 10 years old I came from a family of 12 we had a farm and things were tough every $2 I used to earn I used to always buy Grain for the animals I miss them days if I can do it all over again I would
@@carlp5348 i appreciate sharing your thoughts to me. its good to know that even though life seem to be very hard on us, we managed to overcome it and always focus on the brighter side of the day. God bless you.
@@Cacowninja sure. my mom is a housewife and only finished highschool. my dad is a college graduate. used to have a good paying corporate job as an HR. but his colleague, whom he helped getting in a job in his company, betrayed him by forging his signature on a certain company document. he was fired and my dad never went back to this industry. he later get freelance job and landed on construction industry as a mason. his salary wasn't enough and there are times that it will take 2 or 3 months before he had another project to work with. luckily, our government offers free education from elementary to high school. i went in to a state university but failed to graduate after second year because my parents can't give me allowances regularly and the university was like 60 miles away from home and I can't even afford dormitory rent and goes home and school back and forth. its quite funny that 95% of the tuition fee was provided by the government and I can't even manage to finish college. anyway, i still managed to get a corporate job where I am being paid equally to those who have graduated college. I have skills enough for the employer to trust me and keep me working in their top 200 Fortune company.
Interesting. So based on this specific video, England melt and recycles, Germany presses it into sheets & UK forms them back into cans. Lol a love triangle
In the USA we don't send the aluminum cans overseas. They're recycled right here. The last load I picked up was in south Texas and I took it to Alcoa, TN, to be made into aluminum wheels. That was a load of cans but I've also hauled the ingots. I just wish I had video from the way my trailer was unloaded. I do have at least one picture of the way it was loaded though. It's similar for plastic bottles too. There's a place in Jackson, MS I used to pick up preforms a lot. The loads weighed 42,000 pounds but could be a bit top-heavy.
Thank you for your service. We do however export cans as well as import cans. We also export ingot/import ingot and virtually every type of aluminum alloy. We're not as big exporters as importers, but it does happen. I work at a recycling facility.
I used to work at an Aluminum company called Scepter in New York State. we recycled everything from staples to cans and up to aircraft parts, railroad cars and car engines.
I know the answer to this! I used to drive an 18-wheeler years ago here in Texas, I would carry fresh beef from a privately owned packing plant before the corporations bought all of them out, from East Texas all the way to New Mexico to a lunch meat factory. After unloading sometimes they would have me stop by this place where everybody brought their aluminum cans and they were crushed and compacted into square aluminum can bails. I would then take my trailer full of them down below San Antonio a little ways on i-37 to an aluminum smelting plant where they would melt them down into molds and make aluminum ingots that were probably 1 ft high 3 ft wide and 46 ft long. As to where they went after that I was no longer involved and would go home and sleep 👍🏻🛌
ive worked in a place in kentucky thats basically the carbon copy of this place. i installed new tracks for the molten aluminum and i also welded new teeth on the shredder.
The scale of modern industrialization is mind boggling. 6.5 million cans produced per day by this one factory. Imagine how many other factories are churning out this and how big is the market. Humans are able to manufacture these many no. of items!
None - its much easier to transport one big ingot than many small cans. and since Germany has a more central position in europe the cans wont have to travel too far.
@@kfftfuftur Then listen well. The large block is transported 900kilometer to germany. There it is flattened and rolled up. Then the large reel is transported back to england. Not the small canns, but the large reel. So, yeah, two times 900 kilometer transport of a heavy block. It's silly.
I used to work at an aluminium plant, in Birmingham, UK. In the offices, I remember one time they actually got into clothing, they had a fashion show where the girls wore dresses made from aluminium. I don't think it ever caught on. 🤔🤷🏻♀️ I always recycle my cans! 😊
But the process of obtaining aluminum from the ground is far more experience and takes several time the energy requirements. The fuel is the biggest cost on the melters.
Aluminum is actually pretty easy to melt compared to other metals. Its melting point is only 1200 degrees, by comparison copper is 1900 and steel is 2500.
I read that aluminium was discovered already in the late 16 hundreds in Europe, but as mentioned in the video, it’s been extremely expensive to extract for many years. However it was called Aluminium. Around 1850 or so an American engineer (forgot his) developed a furnace which was highly effective and made it drop drastically in price. This engineer used the wrong spelling in his patent description but as a act of honor for the merited contributor to US-industry they adopted „Aluminum“.
"I read that..." The spelling "aluminum" is a spelling first used by the British Chemist, Humphrey Davy. He first proposed the name "alumia" in 1808. In 1811 he published a paper calling it "aluminium". In 1812 he published a chemistry textbook, in it he called it "aluminum".
@@sammadsaeed3373, either name is considered acceptable, because they have both been used since the 1800s, from the very beginning of the use of the metal. It's just a variant spelling, like "grey" and "gray", "color" or "colour", "realize" or "realise".
This is what I do in the back yard on a slightly smaller scale, the King of Random got me melting cans and casting ingots. Its a lot of fun melting metals and casting stuff, its the main thing I do on RU-vid these days. This was very interesting to see, the Aluminium VS Aluminum part was interesting, lets all just call it Alumium again and be done with the discussion 👍
It really takes away from the video, I just skipped over the parts with those idiots talking , He looks like that guy that got bodysnatched in the movie Get Out
also a good reason that it takes so much energy to make is because aluminum is highly reactive and almost never is found in its metallic state. Compounds of it need to be refined, heated up until molten, held there, and then electrolyzed. The electrolysis part can be thought of as adding energy to separate nonillions of stuck together tiny strong magnets which is extracting the aluminum from the rest of the molecule.
@@tobyhorn9641 the point OP was making was that aluminum ore is an oxide - you must put a shit ton of energy into it in order to get elemental aluminum out. It takes less energy to remelt that same elemental aluminum later; which is why recycling is essential.
@@chouseification then Thay need to pay us more when we sell cans and such at the junk yard what we get payed for junk is about half to quarter what that do at The foundery
@@tobyhorn9641 yeah, yet they have to transport the cans from point A to point B, and pay the people doing the driving. Don't expect to get 80% of actual value unless you're selling gold.
I used to haul ingots and sows out of the Alcoa plant in Rockdale, Texas to the Reynolds Aluminum plant near Davenport, IA (don't remember exactly where...20 years ago).
The process is very complex and energy-intensive, just for the sake of quenching your thirst for a very short while. Personally, I've picked so many drink cans littered in my local village for the past several years that it has totally put me off buying any drinks in cans. Drink cans are by far the most common items we collect. We do put the clean enough ones in our recycling. When I see what's involved in producing and recycling aluminium cans, I'm even less likely to buy them for my own consumption!
You should not be put off by the energy usage for recycling cans. It is still VASTLY less than the cost to produce new cans! What this video only briefly mentions is how hard it is to get aluminum out of the ground and smelt it into a usable form. Even compared to glass it is drastically harder. This is why using aluminum cans is so important...it ensures that the cans stay in circulation and are infinitely recyclable. If you want to make a big difference for the planet, contact your local authorities and start an effort for deposit programs (where you get $ for recycling cans). MOST of the world does not have these programs, which greatly increases recycle rates. Theoretically, if people recycled all aluminum cans, we could supply all the canned beverage needs without ever mining another lb. of aluminum from the ground.
@@cuthwulf Thanks for your comment. I'm in favour of a total ban on small drinks cans and bottles. The more litter I collect, the more I feel this way. So I'll keep picking litter and recycling what I find and will not buy a single drinks bottle for the rest of my life. Being the change I want to see.
@@cuthwulf The cans are not infinitely recyclable. There can be up to 20% metal loss during remelt. The coatings on the cans are also highly toxic and need to be treated first. The dross from processing is a mixture of sodium/potassium oxide, aluminium oxide and free metal. It is considered as hazardous waste which is costly and requires specialised equipment. The profitability of the whole process is highly dependent on the LME price for Al. Out of spec metal will reduce the price of the finished product. This little video makes it all sound clean, efficient and sensible. In reality it is a dirty, expensive and energy intensive process.
In New York, (didn't know it was different in other states, hence the edit) you get five cents for each can you recycle. So, if you want to make one million dollars then, you'd have to recycle twenty million cans!
Note to the Younger generation: You used to get money if you returned old glass bottles. Then the cost , despite the 1800 odd Kilometere journey involved for aluminium became cheaper.
"Technically" even new cans aren't pure aluminum. They're an aluminum/magnesium alloy, with the top having a higher percentage of magnesium in the alloy.
