[Texascavers] recycling

[Mixon Bill]

Recycling aluminum makes more sense than recycling just about  
anything else. About all that has to be done to recycle it is to melt  
it down. And making aluminum from ore is expensive because it takes a  
lot of electricity. (There are a lot of aluminum plants in the  
northwestern US because of cheap power from the Columbia River dams.)  
When the Washington Monument in D.C. was built, it was capped with  
the precious metal aluminum, which shows how difficult it used to be  
to make. There is no lack of the ore, however. Aluminum is a pretty  
common element, third most common in the earth's crust, in fact. Its  
price has more to do with the price of energy than anything else.
    Still, I think the price one gets for aluminum cans may be  
subsidized by the industry as a token of greenness, judging by the  
per-pound price one gets for cans and the per-ton price of aluminum  
on the commodities market. Or perhaps cans are made of some alloy or  
purity that is more valuable than ordinary aluminum. Anyway, for one  
reason or another, recycling places pay more for cans than for other  
aluminum.
   Iron is also easy to recycle, of course, and 50% or more of the  
steel in the US is recycled, I believe. And copper, of course,  
although I wonder how much pollution is caused by separating it from  
its electrical insulation.
    Many other things that people like to recycle aren't really as  
important. Paper goes downhill: good paper can only be recycled into  
poorer paper, and that into cardboard. Anyway, paper is grown as a  
crop, like corn. Nobody is cutting trees out from under spotted owls  
to make paper. The ingredients in glass are dirt cheap (because  
they're basically dirt), and not a whole lot more energy is used in  
making a fresh batch than is consumed in melting the recycled stuff  
(and there's the cost of sorting, transporting, etc.). I don't think  
most plastic can really be recycled into new plastic of any quality.  
I think it mostly ends up ground up and incorporated into fake deck  
wood and such.
   Metals aside, I don't think there are any real environmental  
advantages to recycing except reducing the need for landfill space.  
And the landfill problem is more a matter of wimpy politicians who  
won't make siting decisions (sort of like the nuclear waste problem)  
than anything else.--Mixon

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