“The U.S. airline industry discards enough aluminum cans every year to build nearly 58 Boeing 747s and enough paper to fill a football field–size hole 230 feet deep—that’s 4,250 tons of aluminum and 72,250 tons of paper. The 30 largest airports in the country, with the help of the airlines, create enough waste to equal the trash produced by cities the size of Miami or Minneapolis.”
—Airlines & Recycling: The Not-So-Green Skies
We just flew United to/from Oahu for our end of summer vacation, and, while its crossed my mind before, I took particular notice of how unbelievably wasteful flying is. The flight attendants were coming down the aisles continuously with trash bags and seemingly just throwing everything into one. Everyone gets a drink, some with the can and a plastic cup. The food (that you have to buy now) comes in ridiculously overpackaged containers. Everything seems to be disposable. Its pretty bad.
aluminum gets recycled though
Even when it goes in the trash? ;)
aluminum doesn’t go to landfills, so long as the state has a recycling program.
Also, Aluminum is the easiest and cheapest metal to recycle
watch Penn and Teller’s episode on Recycling, they say it them selves that Aluminum is the only thing that gets efficiently recycled
That’s wrong! Steel is much cheaper and easier to recycle. It requires more energy to recycle aluminum than it does to make steel from scratch. Furthermore, aluminum that is discarded instead of being recycled will last many years, whereas, steel will rust away in a year or so.
well in penn and tellers episode, they compared it to every day recycling products like plastic and glass. So in comparasion to plastic and glass, aluminum is much better to recycle
And it requires more energy to make aluminium from bauxite than it does to recycle it. On the other hand, it requires less energy to extract steel from iron ore than it does to recycle steel.
The values you’re comparing are meaningless.
Obviously aluminum is very recyclable — the issue is they are not recycling it. It goes in the same bag as everything else, which goes to the landfill.
If they were recycling it, this wouldn’t be a big deal.
If the landfill it’s going to is anything like the ones surrounding our area in California, those cans won’t be buried. They’ll be extracted by the landfill workers and they recycle them. Not saying this happens everywhere, but it should.
It’s funny that more people in America don’t turn in recyclables for money. I was recently in Argentina, and at night, several people would come into the city (Buenos Aires) from the surrounding neighborhoots to sort through the garbage, taking out all the cans / bottles / plastics they could find. They turn those in for money. They also had a system in the grocery stores and convenience stores for you to return your empty bottles in this really cool little machine and get a store credit toward your next purchase.
The airlines will not do anything that costs a penny more like using two bags to contain what can be put into one. They do not care about ‘green’ at all, rather, they simply want to scrabble together as much money as possible to try to keep their poorly run companies going.
I spoke to a man who used to work for Alcoa, a large (the largest?) producer and recycler of aluminum. He said that a lot of times, cans that were turned in for recycling wind up getting shipped all around the country before they are recycled, depending on which state is offering the most $$ for the aluminum. It is a huge waste of fuel that sometimes doesn’t even wind up being worth it in the end, depending on the market. Think of all the air pollution!