ALUMINUM PAYS TO RECYCLE

Aluminum cans – our highest paying recyclable material - have been, and still are, the number one fund raising tool. The cans are light-weight and can easily be crushed to reduce their volume and make them convenient to accumulate in large quantities and yet still be manageable to handle. The aluminum industry has spent a lot of money over the years promoting aluminum recycling and their advertising campaigns have been quite successful. Although the aluminum industry is constantly striving to use less and less aluminum in their manufacturing process (in 1972 one pound of aluminum produced 21.75 cans compared to 33.12 cans in 2000), you can generally figure that at the $.25 per pound that we pay, each can is worth a little under $.01.

When we receive aluminum cans from the general public we weight them and put them into a 1 cubic yard hopper. When that hopper is full, it is taken to an inside storage area waiting for processing. The aluminum cans that are received from Floyd County’s remote collection sites are mixed with steel cans. The cans that are received from the City of Rome’s Curbside program are mixed not only with steel cans, but also paperboard. After removing the paperboard by hand, the City and County’s mixed aluminum and steel cans are put through a magnetic separator. This device has a small conveyor that transports the cans up to a magnetized roller that captures the steel cans and the non-magnetic aluminum cans fall off into a 1 cubic yard hopper. This method is about 95% successful in separating the two materials, however, some aluminum gets caught in the larger steel cans and our personnel remove those aluminum cans by hand before sending the steel into a holding area. Once we have accumulated a certain number of full aluminum hoppers, we run these cans down our 50 foot conveyor and have personnel stationed on each side so they can spot and pick out all contaminants from the cans before they drop into the baler. Contaminants for this material are usually: steel cans and lids, glass and trash. We ship our baled aluminum directly to the mill that will be melting the cans and producing sheet aluminum for the can manufacturing industry, so it is imperative that our bales be totally free of contaminants. In 2002 the Recycling Center shipped out 101,355 pounds of aluminum and generated $ 43,405 in revenues. From those revenues, we paid out $ 13,368 to the public in our “Buy Back Program”.

Approximately 100 billion aluminum beverage cans are produced in the United States each year – more than either nails or paper clips. Industry experts estimate that the energy required to produce one aluminum can from “scratch” to be 2.3 mega-joules of energy. This is equal to about the amount of energy expended to keep a 100-watt bulb lit for six hours, or about 1.7 percent of the energy of a gallon of gasoline. Now imagine those numbers applied to 100 billions cans per year and you can get an idea of the high amount of energy needed to make aluminum cans from the natural resources used in the process. However, when new cans are made from recycled aluminum cans, the mills can save up to 95% of the energy costs. Industry experts say “there are many benefits to recycling aluminum cans. Recycling is a vital source of energy savings; it saves natural resources and minimizes the need for landfill space. Once produced from raw materials, aluminum retains the ability to be recycled, forever, from a can to a can without deteriorating in quality or value”. It makes economic sense to promote the recycling of all of our aluminum cans since these energy savings are passed along to us at the point of purchase. Without a strong supply of recycled aluminum cans, the cost of the cans would be beyond what we would be willing to pay for our beverages to be packaged in aluminum cans. Contact the Recycling Center at 291-5266 or rfrecycl@roman.net for more information. Visit our website at www.romefloydrecycles.org .