I know this question is not so bright, but I am very curious why do we recycle aluminum cans? Is it that they are not biodegradable?
We recycle cans as to save energy (and money) as the processing of aluminum cans from raw materials is very energy intensive, thus remelting them down and processing new aluminum products reduces energy use.
Heck yeah. Even an old school, smoke-belching industrialist would recycle *metal*. That's always been true. Why did people suddenly stop recycling metals? Have you PRICED metals lately? Aluminum is over a buck a pound, copper is $3 a pound, steel is over $200 a ton.
Melting recycled aluminum only uses 5% of the energy that is required to produce aluminum from ore. So basically, recycling it saves energy.
Aluminum is not biodegradable. Also making aluminum from ore requires a lot of energy. Recycling cans is easy and saves a whole lot of energy reducing green house gases. Recycling aluminum also reduces the mining required to dig up aluminum ore thereby saving the land and stopping pollution from mine run-off.
Save the Rainforest! Recycle Aluminum! Did you know that aluminum comes from the ore Bauxite? And that bauxite is mined in the rainforest? Every time you throw away an aluminum can, that's one less that is being recycled, and one more can's worth of bauxite that needs to be mined from the rainforest. The bad thing about mining bauxite, just like any other ore, is that it is in the ground. Since bauxite is mined in the rainforest, there are tons of trees growing on top. In order to get to the bauxite, the trees have to be clear-cut and are usually burned since there main opperation is to mine the ore, not harvest lumber. This puts a lot of pollution into the air from the trees burning and the fossil fuels spent for the machinery to take them down. Once the land is clear, mining begins, burning even more fossil fuels. Then the ore is shipped to a facility that turns the ore into aluminum (another energy-expensive process) and then the aluminum is finally shiped to us (again, more energy, i.e. fossil fuels spent) so that we can then, finally, make cans out of them. So why don't we just make new cans out of the old ones when we are done with them? They are already here, no need for shipping. They are free, just need to be trasported to the recycling facility. And we don't have to cut rainforests to get more aluminum if we use what we've already got. Some day we will be mining our landfills because we've irresponsibly and selfishly used up our resources elsewhere. Hope this answers your question and gives you the motivation to start recycling!
