14. Recycling aluminum.

Every day Americans go to more than a million pounds of aluminum. But for much of this megamaterial it more beats/appears (&) for sum around.

“It’s o recyclable! About 2/3 of aluminum that’s ever been made is still in existence”.

Well, it may take a lot of power to make aluminum. Once aluminum oxide is stripped of its oxygen atoms metallic aluminium is incredibly stable. That means it can be melted down and reused again and again forever. (Aluminum’ s like a phoenix (?), nothing goes away. Everything recycles)

Recycled cans wind up in a place like this : Ann Hazert Bush recycling court in Hayworth, California. (..)

Every loose scrap of paper, piece of steel or plastic, anything that’s not aluminum needs to be removed. (…we shift this to the mills…)

After inspection the loose cans fall out into the crusher where a massive hydraulic press crunches them into bail stamped perfectly square. Then they’re shifted off to the smelter

They gonna be melted down and made into new aluminum can sheets. And here’s a staggering fact to ponder with friends over beer. In less than 3 months an aluminum can circulates once through its lifecycle. That can can be all the way through that closed loop system and back in your refrigerator, 16 or 19 days later filled with a new beverage. Although using much less energy, in Australia smelters alone consume 10% of the nation’s total power. So while recycling you cut the demand for electricity and that reduces greenhouse gas emissions. Recycling aluminum can saves about 95% of the energy required to make a can out of virgin materials.

15. Cell-phone recycling At this moment in the United States 205 million people use a cellphone. Since people upgrade or replace their phones there are also 650 million retired phones. Ever wondered what happens to retired cellphones and charges ? When people throw them in a trash they eventually end up in a local municipal landfill. Cell phones and chargers contain toxic material such as lead, mercury and cadmium, which can end up in public drinking water and food sources. Howstuffwork recently visited Collective Good - mobile phone recycling center to find out how old cell phones can be used to make new ones. Cell phones have valuable materials inside such as gold, silver and platinum. The most valuable material is gold, which is used in the phone circuit boards. Chargers contain copper, which is less valuable but is still reusable. By today’s method of strip mining, collecting one clean ounce of gold generates 79 tons of toxic waste, the equivalent of 35 cars stacked on top of each other. But if you recycle one phone, you can reclaim all the metals you need for the manufacture of a new one. Another way to recycle cell phones is by taking the working parts of otherwise broken phones and combining those parts together with the usable parts from other phones to create one complete working phone. These rebuilt phones can then be sent back into circulation without ever needing newly manufactured parts.