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Every time I throw an aluminum can in the trash I tell myself that I’m incentivizing the future mining of landfills. One man’s trash...

alephnil 9y ago
The earth's crust is 13% aluminium by weight, so there is no chance there ever will be a shortage. The thing with aluminium is rather the amount of energy needed to produce it compared to the energy needed to recycle it, which is about 20:1. Once a can has been put into a landfill mixed with other stuff and with time also oxidized, that advantage is mostly gone.
- jessriedel 9y ago
  > Once a can has been put into a landfill mixed with other stuff and with time also oxidized, that advantage is mostly gone. What is the typical oxidization rate? (Average by mass, I guess.) I thought oxidation was mostly negligible because, unlike rust, aluminum oxide forms a protective layer. I would think this is fairly effective in a dump. Nimble robots and better image recognition will eventually drive the cost of landfill retrieval way down.
- waterhouse 9y ago
  > The earth's crust is 13% aluminium by weight I found this astonishing, and looked for sources. It looks like they[1][2] say it's more like 8.2% aluminum by weight. That's still quite high, though, and also it's the third highest behind oxygen and silicon. (If you exclude oxygen, I think it goes up to 15.4% aluminum.) Very interesting. [1] http://education.jlab.org/itselemental/ele013.html http://education.jlab.org/itselemental/ele013.html [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abundance_of_elements_in_Earth%27s_crust https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abundance_of_elements_in_Earth...
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
- zeckalpha 9y ago
  > no chance there ever will be a shortage. In our lifetimes.
  - adrianN 9y ago
    One can only hope that by the time we turned 13% of our crust into cans we also have technology to mine stuff from asteroids.
  - astrodust 9y ago
    I think it'll take a long time to use up the crust.

alephnil 9y ago

The earth's crust is 13% aluminium by weight, so there is no chance there ever will be a shortage. The thing with aluminium is rather the amount of energy needed to produce it compared to the energy needed to recycle it, which is about 20:1. Once a can has been put into a landfill mixed with other stuff and with time also oxidized, that advantage is mostly gone.

jessriedel 9y ago
> Once a can has been put into a landfill mixed with other stuff and with time also oxidized, that advantage is mostly gone. What is the typical oxidization rate? (Average by mass, I guess.) I thought oxidation was mostly negligible because, unlike rust, aluminum oxide forms a protective layer. I would think this is fairly effective in a dump. Nimble robots and better image recognition will eventually drive the cost of landfill retrieval way down.
waterhouse 9y ago
> The earth's crust is 13% aluminium by weight I found this astonishing, and looked for sources. It looks like they[1][2] say it's more like 8.2% aluminum by weight. That's still quite high, though, and also it's the third highest behind oxygen and silicon. (If you exclude oxygen, I think it goes up to 15.4% aluminum.) Very interesting. [1] http://education.jlab.org/itselemental/ele013.html http://education.jlab.org/itselemental/ele013.html [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abundance_of_elements_in_Earth%27s_crust https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abundance_of_elements_in_Earth...
- deleted 9y ago
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zeckalpha 9y ago
> no chance there ever will be a shortage. In our lifetimes.
- adrianN 9y ago
  One can only hope that by the time we turned 13% of our crust into cans we also have technology to mine stuff from asteroids.
- astrodust 9y ago
  I think it'll take a long time to use up the crust.