Aluminum foil recyclable info
Aluminum recyclable tips? Aluminum Thrown Away and Never Recycled: We may be recycling more aluminum every year, but things could still be a lot better. According to the Environmental Defense Fund, Americans throw away so much aluminum that every three months we could collect enough scrap to rebuild the entire U.S. commercial airplane fleet from the ground up. That’s a lot of wasted aluminum. Globally, more than half of all the aluminum cans produced and sold every year are thrown away and never recycled, which means they have to be replaced by new cans made from virgin materials.
How is aluminum foil made? Aluminum foil is made of sheets of aluminum that are rolled very, very thin. Those sheets are wound onto a cardboard tube and stored in a cardboard box until you are ready to use them. The vast majority of aluminum foil manufactured in the United States is used to wrap food at home or in food service. Here a few fun facts about aluminum foil from the Aluminum Association: It was used in candy wrappers as early as 1913, when Life Savers were wrapped in sheets of foil. About 7 billion containers of aluminum foil are produced every year. That equals 220 containers every second. Aluminum is a great conductor of heat. If you cover a pan with aluminum foil and leave it in the oven for a long time, the foil will cool much faster than glass or steel once you pull the pan out of the oven. That makes it easy to pull back a corner to check on your food – although, then you have to be careful of hot steam. Aluminum foil is great in the kitchen, but it is also used in insulation, electronics and for art and decorative purposes.
If you’re recycling aluminum foil that you bought and used for storage, separate the foil from the paperboard box and corrugated tube before recycling. If foil is combined with other materials (such as in drink boxes, candy wrappers and yogurt tops) and can’t be separated, you’ll want to throw it away. Foil mixed with other materials is considered recycling contamination. Combine all sheets of foil into one ball. This will keep the material easily separated from other products, and also prevent it from blowing away (aluminum foil is a very light material). Discover extra details on is aluminum foil recyclable.
If you are able to recycle your aluminum foil locally, pat yourself on the back: Recycled aluminum saves more than 90 percent of the energy needed to produce virgin aluminum, and it’s one of the most valuable recyclable materials. Its recycling lifecycle is also relatively quick: An aluminum can that’s put in a recycling bin can be back on the shelves, as another can, in as little as two months. You can even buy aluminum foil that is made of recycled aluminum.
Aluminum Recycling Saves Energy! Discarded aluminum beverage cans are often recycled right back into new cans. Used beverage containers are the largest component of aluminum scrap. Most of these are recycled back into cans. The automotive industry is the second-largest user of recovered aluminum. According to Steve Larkin, president of the Aluminum Association, recycling old cans into new ones uses 95 percent less energy and produces 95 percent fewer greenhouse gas emissions than producing new cans entirely from scratch. In fact, the recovered aluminum processed in a typical year saves the energy equivalent of 1.3 billion gallons of gasoline. Discover more information on https://www.ablison.com/how-to-recycle-aluminum-foil-and-is-it-biodegradable/.