There’s still a lot of aluminum lost to landfills, which can be improved by post-consumer recycling. That’s how well aluminum can be and is recycled! Aluminum is not only a great material because it’s lightweight and conducts heat well, it can also be recycled indefinitely (if uncontaminated). Mining may be rough, but there is a silver lining (pun intended)! Almost 75% of all the aluminum ever produced in the US is still in use today. It’s hard to live in our modern world without extraction, so we have to work harder to use our resources efficiently and make conscientious decisions about how we apply those resources. Extractive industries like mining (for any ore, element, oil, or gem) are not our most earth-friendly activity. If refining aluminum sounds incredibly resource-intensive, that’s because it is. Mining operations have taken this damage into account more and more in recent years, incorporating plans to restore and regrow natural habitats once mining is completed.Īll refining processes use varying levels of electricity and water, which can cause higher carbon emissions, create air and water pollution, and even noise and heat pollution. Clear-cutting trees and grasslands contributes to biodiversity loss, habitat loss, carbon emissions, and erosion. After all that, two tonnes of alumina become one tonne of aluminum.Ĭhemistry not your thing? This video can show you what the process looks like! The Impact: Land, Air, and WaterĪs you have probably noticed, turning Bauxite into Aluminum requires a lot of energy and has a variety of environmental impacts.īoth open and underground mines affect the plant and animal life immediately surrounding an area and beyond for multiple generations. Via electrolysis and even more chemical reactions, requiring high amounts of heat, alumina is dissolved, melted, and passed through a current so that it loses the oxygen bound to it, turning it into pure, molten aluminum. It looks like a thick chalk dust at this point. Facilities use chemical processes to weed out other compounds like silica and iron oxides until they have a wealth of white, powdery alumina (aluminum oxide-Al2O3). Once collected, the bauxite ore has to be refined. However, to recover all the aluminum in an area, swaths of land must be bull-dozed to reveal the dirt and ore underneath. It doesn’t sit very deeply in the earth’s crust, so some energy can be saved on drilling. Aluminum as we know it has gone through a lot to get to our supermarket shelves (among other amazing uses).īauxite is collected from the ground in an open-pit mining operation. If you’re looking for shining bits of silver in the ground, though, you won’t find it. It’s a red dirt and clay mixture commonly found in Australia, Brazil, and India. The Process: Bauxite to Alumina to AluminumĪluminum is hidden in an ore called Bauxite. Fortunately, the environmental impact of that process can be somewhat balanced out by post-mining rehabilitation, efficient recycling, and generally reducing our consumption. You can find out how to avoid them below.By SCA Community Engagement Fellow Hayden SloanĪluminum (or Aluminium, if you’re not from the US) is an abundant element within Earth’s surface– but getting it out of the ground is an arduous process, requiring heavy machinery to plow up acres and acres of land. These cookies and other technologies capture data like your IP address, when you viewed the page or email, what device you were using and where you were. ![]() We use various advertising partners, including Amazon, Facebook, and Google. These cookies are used to track your activity on the BenQ website and other websites across the Internet, help measure the effectiveness of our advertising campaign and deliver advertisements that are more relevant to you and your interests. See list of performance and advertising cookies To opt-out of Hotjar collecting data, you can disable tracking completely by following link:. To opt-out of SessionCam collecting data, you can disable tracking completely by following link:. To opt out of certain ads provided by Google you can use any of the methods set forth here or using the Google Analytics opt out browser add-on here. You can control the information provided to Google, SessionCam and Hotjar. If you want to opt-out of advertising cookies, you have to turn-off performance cookies. We also use Google Analytics, SessionCam and Hotjar to track activity and performance on the BenQ website. These cookies help to improve the performance of BenQ. Performance cookies and advertising cookies
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