By Sally Chappell

Bridgton Recycling Committee

Even as the oceans swirl with human-generated trash and as we devote more precious land to landfills, we hear that recycling isn’t worth the bother. How untrue! Surely, the difficulties of recycling plastic need to be addressed. More progress needs to happen with the different plastic formulas taken in to account. There is one commodity, however, where no difficulties exist for ease of recyclability: aluminum.

The applications for aluminum are woven into modern life. It is a lightweight, sturdy metal necessary for the infrastructure we see all around us, as well as for products we use daily. What an awesome material! When we learn how it is produced, we may give it the respect it deserves by being more vigilant about recycling our cans, bakeware and aluminum foil.

I recently came across a lot of good information about aluminum from Wasted: How We Squander Time, Money, And Natural Resources — And What We Can Do About It by Byron Reese and Scott Hoffman. The chapters devoted to aluminum revealed both the difficulties of mining bauxite, the ore from which aluminum is made, as well as the ease of recycling aluminum. We can and should do better to make sure we always have a plentiful supply of aluminum. Throwing aluminum in the trash or littering the roadsides with it is a shame.

Bauxite is mined in far flung places on the earth. Australia, China, Brazil, Guinea, and India are the top five bauxite producing countries according to World Atlas. Ideally, the refining of aluminum from bauxite would be done near the mining site. Due to the high amounts of electricity needed to refine aluminum, however, most often the bauxite ore needs to be shipped to places where electricity is cheap. Iceland is one example because of its plentiful supply of geothermal energy. 70 percent of all the electricity generated on Iceland is used for its three aluminum refineries. Cheap electricity, on the other hand, can also come from coal-fired power plants.  

In contrast to the mining, shipping and refining of bauxite ore into aluminum, recycling aluminum is a simple process. Our used aluminum merely needs to be melted into more aluminum. We have hundreds of aluminum recycling plants spread across 31 states and two Canadian provinces that use one-fifteenth the energy of bauxite ore smelting plants. According to “Wasted,” “if you drink a soda today and throw the can in your recycling bin, odds are someone else will be drinking from that same aluminum in just two months.”

In the United States, only 40 percent of the aluminum used is recycled while the need for aluminum keeps rising especially for the long-term use in infrastructure and home and commercial construction. Think of the benefits if that 40 percent was substantially increased. Think of the benefits to the climate, the money saved and the jobs generated!

Finally, we have to consider how to increase the recycling of aluminum. Remember when cars didn’t have cup holders? How about making standard trash and recycling receptacles in all vehicles?

A national bottle bill would be very welcome; presently only 10 states have bottle bills that vary from state to state. If there were a national bottle bill, increasing the deposit on all cans and bottles to 25 cents would surely give people pause before trashing them. This would be difficult to enact because the beverage industry has historically opposed bottle deposits and has funded campaigns to discourage such laws.

Several European countries have remarkably high return rates on bottles and cans through “deposit return schemes” running between 13 and 30 cents depending on the size of the container. Norway is a leader in this regard attracting attention from other countries as to how their system can be duplicated. The political will to adopt such “schemes” here in the United States is slowly trending in the European direction despite a voter base that presently prefers freedom from regulation.

In the meantime, we could make roadside clean up a year-round volunteer activity with recognition going to participants who do this exceptional public service. Also, we need to promote with consistency the high value and importance of recycling.

Aluminum is awesome! Let’s recycle it, conserve it and respect the process of making it.