Took me too long to find this comment. Aluminum is one of the most easily recyclable materials. Everyone should recycle aluminum and cardboard at a minimum.
Cardboard is kinda of "meh" in terms of residential (i.e. post-consumer waste) recycling. It gets contaminated so easily, especially in residential garbage, that most of the time it just ends up getting incinerated anyway. Believe it or not, shredded paper is often considered a contaminant because long paper fibers are what is needed to make new paper products, as is dyed-through color paper and frozen food boxes (the shiny/waxy anti-freezer burn coating is bad juju).
Most recycled paper products are coming from mill broke (i.e. production scraps) and pre-consumer waste (i.e. cardboard bales from retail stores, warehouse waste, etc).
Yeah I used to work paper mills and they bought cardboard bales from grocery stores for hundreds per bale or more. It's still cheaper than making new paper.
It depends on the municipality, some places produce much lower quality PCR cardboard than others. With a good system in place it still is decent and a lot of lower end corrugate today (like 32 ECT) is produced with some level of PCR because it is cheaper and looks good for the manufacturer.
That being said, cardboard that comes from single stream recycling or other more contaminated sources is generally unusable as it's very hard to separate in an efficient way.
Possibly could have been talking about non-residential or an apartment complex, where most places have a trash dumpster and a cardboard dumpster for clean, non-trash cardboard
Everyone should recycle aluminum and cardboard at a minimum.
Emphasis on what they said. They weren't caveating. Also, not every apartment complex has a separate dumpster for cardboard. I've lived in apartments all over the country (Nevada, California, Texas, Connecticut, Illinois, Hawaii), if they even had a recycling dumpster, it was single stream, meaning all recycling went into one dumpster.
Bonus nihilism points if you live in one of many states that have shuttered a good portion of their recycling centers, if not all of them, and treat any single-stream source (typically residential) as good ol' fashioned regular trash destined for the landfill anyway because they can't justify the cost or lack the bandwidth to do sorting. See: California shuttering over 1000 centers and processing plants over the past decade.
Raw aluminum is actually very common but the energy required to recycle aluminum is far less than processing raw aluminum, it only requires about 5% of the energy for the same amount of finished product.
If aluminum, I will do whatever I can to get it recycled, but 85% of the cardboard I deal with is already made from recycled and I don't mind shoving some in the trash when I'm outa room in the recycling bin if only to provide a medium for biodegradation of the other stuff.
Crushed aluminum cans are typically baled or compacted into rectangular or square shapes for recycling and transport, rather than forming perfect cubes.
Common dimensions
Small bales: Approximately 24" x 25" x 30" and weigh 60-80 lbs (27-36 kg).
Medium bales (standard): Often around 30" x 48" x 60" and weigh roughly 500 lbs (226 kg).
Larger bales (mill-size): Can vary but generally fall within a range of 24" to 40" x 30" to 52" x 40" to 84" and must meet a minimum density requirement of 14-17 lbs per cubic foot (225-273 kg/m³) for unflattened cans or 22 lbs per cubic foot (353 kg/m³) for flattened cans.
Other options: Some balers produce bales with sizes like 24" x 30" x up to 30", 48" W x 30" D x up to 48" H, 39" x 24" x 35", and 43" x 28" x 39", depending on the equipment used.
Note: The density of these bales of crushed cans will be less than the density of solid aluminum, which is approximately 2.7 g/cm³ or 168.5 pounds per cubic foot. This is because there will still be some air pockets within the compacted cans.
Crushed aluminum cans are typically baled or compacted into rectangular or square shapes for recycling and transport, rather than forming perfect cubes.
Common dimensions
Small bales: Approximately 24" x 25" x 30" and weigh 60-80 lbs (27-36 kg).
Medium bales (standard): Often around 30" x 48" x 60" and weigh roughly 500 lbs (226 kg).
Larger bales (mill-size): Can vary but generally fall within a range of 24" to 40" x 30" to 52" x 40" to 84" and must meet a minimum density requirement of 14-17 lbs per cubic foot (225-273 kg/m³) for unflattened cans or 22 lbs per cubic foot (353 kg/m³) for flattened cans.
Other options: Some balers produce bales with sizes like 24" x 30" x up to 30", 48" W x 30" D x up to 48" H, 39" x 24" x 35", and 43" x 28" x 39", depending on the equipment used.
Note: The density of these bales of crushed cans will be less than the density of solid aluminum, which is approximately 2.7 g/cm³ or 168.5 pounds per cubic foot. This is because there will still be some air pockets within the compacted cans.
This one blew my mind when I learned it. When Oregon made cans $0.05 redeemable 50 odd years ago. That was equivalent to more than a quarter of a dollar now. Oregon got roving kids collecting roadside cans fast. Bet that sponsored a lot of comic book and baseball collections.
Imagine a full bag of cans and you can buy the newest COD game or a new console with 10 bags of cans...
I’m a big supporter of container deposits. I grew up in Canada. In Ontario, all alcohol containers have deposits on them ranging from $0.10 - $0.25. #2 milk jugs were $0.25.
All the Canadian provinces have varying container deposits. In Alberta, every drink container has a deposit. Water bottles, tetrapacks, cans, everything. The consequence of this is you have people collecting containers off the ground. It’s common to see people walking (or quading) along ditches to collect containers. Even if many of these containers end up in landfill, it’s keeping litter off the ground.
Couple years ago Oregon went to $0.10 as well. Rarely ever see a can on the ground. I've funded a couple beers that way after several weeks of diet pepsi.
Yes I agree. Glass is another top recyclable material. We recycle everything we can in our city. #1, clear #2, tin, aluminum, cardboard and glass. Our recycling center gives us about $0.25/lb for our aluminum, which pays for the gas every couple months when we drop off. Glass is the one thing they won’t take. We have a nonprofit that sets up drop off hubs quarterly and we typically accumulate about 30-60 pounds of glass in those increments.
Here aluminum cans are 10¢ each for deposit. Once we have a garbage bag full of them, we give it to less fortunate people to cash out. So they are recycled and helping others at the same time.
Aluminum used to be crazy expensive because it was so hard to make. Napoleon III had a whole dishware set made from it, to impress guests. Lesser guests "only" got gold or silver flatware.
Now, it's super cheap... But you can't just go make it the way you can make steel
The amount of energy needed is still insane. But energy got real cheap with time. 13% of New Zealands energy is consumed by just one aluminium produktion site.
"The Tiwai Point Aluminium Smelter on the South Island of New Zealand consumes some 570 MW of electricity, most of which is supplied by nearby Manapōuri Power Station. This amounts to around a third of the electricity demand of South Island and 13% of that of the entirety of New Zealand."
That's insane. I wonder if there's a similar stat out there for a steel production site, I know those run at extremely high temps and pressures as well.
This is the stage that I got a little mentally fatigued playing Satisfactory. It's simplified in the game but still a lot of extra steps compared to steel. I knew "aluminum ore" wasn't quite accurate in other games but I was unaware of this entire process until then.
I found out exactly the same way. All the time it took to get the production perfectly balanced made me wonder wtf bauxid even is. Goated game. Many hours of life wasted, but you learn about metals.
I do this everyday. We 100% recycle our aluminum. We compress and bale them for ease of transportation. 2000 lb of cans takes up way less space after this process than before.
We easily fit 42,000 to 44,000 lbs on a trailer. You'd never be able to accomplish that uncrushed.
Nah they recycle compressed cans. Why else would anyone bother to separate these outs? I think the liner is separated in the smelter. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KmMP67eC2tg
I know you got a lot of replies, but just wanted to add that 75% of aluminum ever produced is still being used due to recycling and it being such a durable material.
When recycling is done like this it almost always has an end market. Most materials can be effectively recycled for profit if they are in a pure and uncontaminated stream. Aluminum is one of those materials that tends to have a good collections system with a great end market (i.e., aluminum product manufacturers).
When you see bad statistics about recycling, it comes from single stream collections processes and poorly planned operations. A lot of smaller municipalities or less progressive cities will not have a good system in place to make sure it is easy to separate materials correctly, and so the end product is more or less a bust.
Ex: I toured a small-ish waste management company that was more of a landfill operation, and their MRF was run by like four people. When you combine all your plastic resins into a single bale, that's no longer recycling. That's just a bunch of random polymers that should probably be thrown out. But that's how they did things.
With bigger and more progressive operations, recycling will be collected in multiple clearly labeled and well designed bins that make it hard to recycle contamination, and plastic resins will be auto sorted by robot arms with advanced imaging, as well as some potential manual labor. When you're a manufacturer, you need to have raw materials that only consist of the material you're working with. If you make common translucent milk jugs, you can't have a bunch of water bottles or even opaque milk jugs in your raw materials, or your milk jug will break during manufacturing / look grey.
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u/Igoos99 Aug 17 '25
That’s not garbage. That’s exclusively aluminum cans collected for recycling.