[rowante]

I found this excerpt from a book called 'Natural Capitalism' on the CSIRO sustainability newsletter and thought it should be posted here (from Chapter 3 of Natural Capitalism, "Waste Not", pages 49-50 reproduced with kind permission from the publisher www.earthscan.co.uk).


$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('', 'A') striking case study of the complexity of industrial metabolism is provided by James Womack and Daniel Jones in their book Lean Thinking, where they trace the origins and pathways of a can of English cola. The can itself is more costly and complicated to manufacture than the beverage.

Bauxite is mined in Australia, trucked to a chemical reduction mill, each ton of bauxite processed and purified into a half ton of aluminium oxide. It is then stockpiled, loaded on a giant ore carrier and sent to Sweden or Norway, where hydroelectric dams provide cheap electricity. After a month-long journey across two oceans, it usually sits at the smelter for as long as two months.

The smelter takes two hours to turn each half ton of aluminium oxide into a quarter of a ton of aluminium metal, in ingots ten meters long. These are cured for two weeks before being shipped to roller mills in Sweden or Germany. There each ingot is heated to nearly nine hundred degrees Fahrenheit and rolled down to a thickness of an eighth of an inch. The resulting sheets are wrapped in ten-ton coils and transported to a warehouse, and then to a cold rolling mill in the same or another country, where they are rolled tenfold thinner, ready for fabrication. The aluminium is then sent to England, where sheets are punched and formed into cans, which are then washed, dried, painted with a base coat, and then painted again with specific product information. The cans are next lacquered, flanged (they are still topless), sprayed inside with a protective coating to prevent the cola from corroding the can, and inspected.

The cans are palletized, forklifted, and warehoused until needed. They are then shipped to the bottler, where they are washed and cleaned once more, then filled with water mixed with flavoured syrup, phosphorus, caffeine, and carbon dioxide gas. The sugar is harvested from beet fields in France and undergoes trucking, milling, refining and shipping. The phosphorus comes from Idaho, where it is excavated from deep open-pit mines – a process that also unearths cadmium and radioactive thorium. Round-the-clock, the mining company uses the same amount of electricity as a city of 100,000 people in order to reduce the phosphate to food-grade quality. The caffeine is shipped from a chemical manufacturer to the syrup manufacturer in England.

The filled cans are sealed with an aluminum ‘pop-top’ lid at the rate of fifteen hundred cans per minute, then inserted into cardboard cartons printed with matching colour and promotional schemes. The cartons are made of forest pulp that may have originated anywhere from Sweden or Siberia to the oldgrowth, virgin forests of British Columbia that are the home of grizzly, wolverines, otters, and eagles. Palletised again, the cans are shipped to a regional distribution warehouse, and shortly thereafter to a supermarket where a typical can is purchased within three days.

The consumer buys twelve ounces of the phosphate-tinged, caffeine-impregnated, caramel-flavoured sugar water. Drinking the cola takes a few minutes; throwing the can away takes a second. In England, consumers discard 84 percent of all cans, which means that the overall rate of aluminium waste, after counting production losses, is 88 percent. The United States still gets three-fifths of its aluminium from virgin ore, at twenty times the energy intensity of recycled aluminium, and throws away enough aluminium to replace its entire commercial aircraft fleet every three months.

Every product we consume has a similar hidden history, an unwritten inventory of its materials, resources, and impacts. It also has attendant waste generated by its use and disposal ... The amount of waste generated to make a semiconductor chip is over 100,000 times its weight; that of a laptop computer, close to 4,000 times its weight. Two quarts of gasoline and a thousand quarts of water are required to produce a quart of Florida orange juice. One ton of paper requires the use of 98 tons tons of various resources.

[Aaron]

Excellent post,

This speaks to the hidden subsidy oil provides to almost everything.

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('', 'E')very product we consume has a similar hidden history, an unwritten inventory of its materials, resources, and impacts. It also has attendant waste generated by its use and disposal ... The amount of waste generated to make a semiconductor chip is over 100,000 times its weight; that of a laptop computer, close to 4,000 times its weight. Two quarts of gasoline and a thousand quarts of water are required to produce a quart of Florida orange juice. One ton of paper requires the use of 98 tons tons of various resources.

[Ebyss]

Agreed, excellent post. Frightening too. I wonder how long it will take before PO affects this process, both in terms of end-product price and long term viability of the production method.

[Doly]

It's fairly well known that aluminium cans are one of the things that are most likely to disappear if there's an energy crisis. Aluminium is only cheap with cheap energy to produce it. Glass bottles have a much better future.

[gnm]

Wow that is enlightening. I thought the US produced a fair amount of its own Al however... Anyone know? The phosphate mining part is an eye opener. I hadn't thought of that. Makes me glad I don't drink soda though!

When I was young I used to collect used glass soda bottles from construction sites - you could make a fair amount (for a kid) on the return money...

-G

[MonteQuest]

Now perhaps one can understand what I mean when I say there is no techno-fix for peak oil. This is entropy at it's max. Think of all the energy transformations that occur in this process--and all the resultant unusable energy.

[SidneyTawl]

As A kid, well depends on your idea of when kid ends hehe.

Back in the early 70's, upon being broke I spent half an afternoon walking along roadsides picking up bottles. Wan't long before I had a trunkfull and on my way to see one of the best concerts I have ever seen.


(However Led Zep in 1969 is still the highlight).

The goal.

Enough money to pay for my ticket to see "The Who". Which I did earn enough. However concerts then very rarely would cost more than twenty bucks for the best seats.

I also used to be a "bottle racker" for returns at a large grocery store.

Your job was to take all the returns from people and put them into the wood case holders that held 24 bottles. Back then you had lots of different bottlers., So you had to know all the brands of each bottler and could only put them in the case.

Being fast was a pre-req, like able to put 4 bottles in at a time.

As I recall the energy to clean and sterilize the new bottles and the shipping etc. is what made aluminum more cost effective.

Wonder how that would figure today, would the bottles still be more energy intensive.

[j_bumble]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('MonteQuest', 'N')ow perhaps one can understand what I mean when I say there is no techno-fix for peak oil. This is entropy at it's max. Think of all the energy transformations that occur in this process--and all the resultant unusable energy.

[gnm]

Well bottles are a lot heavier which perhaps plays a part in the whole issue of being less cost effective than aluminum. Shipping the bottles to whatever central area to be sterilized etc. I wonder how well it works out when you have a high rate of recycling for the Al? I understand it takes a lot of electricity to produce Aluminum, does it take a lot to recycle it?

-G

[MonteQuest]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('gnm', 'W')ell bottles are a lot heavier which perhaps plays a part in the whole issue of being less cost effective than aluminum. Shipping the bottles to whatever central area to be sterilized etc. I wonder how well it works out when you have a high rate of recycling for the Al? I understand it takes a lot of electricity to produce Aluminum, does it take a lot to recycle it?

-G

[bobaloo]

Did you know that the Washington Monument is capped with a small pyramid made of aluminum? At the time, it was the most precious metal in existence, far more valuable than gold.

Bauxite, or aluminum ore, is basically kaolin, which is what porcelain is made from. In order to separate the aluminum it must be heated to around 4000 degrees in giant electric arc furnaces, normally powered by hydroelectric dams.

The good news is that once created, aluminum only has to be heated to a fairly low temperature to recycle it. I have several thousand pounds of aluminum in my shop, was thinking about selling it, but perhaps it will go up substantially in price one of these days...

[Andy]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('', 'B')auxite, or aluminum ore, is basically kaolin, which is what porcelain is made from. In order to separate the aluminum it must be heated to around 4000 degrees in giant electric arc furnaces, normally powered by hydroelectric dams.

[BlisteredWhippet]

In Washington state, hydropower is more abundant, and it is used to make aluminum cans. However, in 2001 the CA energy crisis caused a price spike in electricity and the smelters halted operation to convert to producing electricity.

This from the Aluminum industry association group:

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('', '
')To ensure domestic aluminum manufacturing, the Association’s view is that the U.S. must increase domestic energy supplies in an environmentally sensitive manner; improve energy efficiency, conservation and development of new technologies; expand and secure our energy delivery infrastructure; ensure affordable energy supplies for low-income households; and thoughtfully streamline energy development regulatory processes.

With some held-over artificial-market disadvantages for industrial customers of electricity, it may be impossible to operate or restore primary smelting capacity in the Northwest U.S., and other regional aluminum plants may become subject to similar concerns. The recommended approach is to provide short-term policies to help the industry transition to a rational market situation, and long-term policies to restore supply-demand balance in electricity markets.

[RealJoe]

I want to concur with Bobaloo and encourage all others to save and conserve aluminum. I was going to make a post some time ago to someone's question about practical investments in light of Peak Oil, that saving aluminum is a better investment than practically anything but farm land.

Particularly for low income and middle income people as most of this forum posters seem like they are. I suspect the gain in aluminum prices could be as much as tenfold in the next decade or two, dwarfing even the price rises we can expect to see in the gold and silver. Gold and silver being the inflationary hedges most people are talking about.

Saving aluminum can be relatively easy as well. A portable, simple can crusher is relatively inexpensive to buy and one could set up an investment system where you take money you might put into savings and buy aluminum cans from friends and neighbors at the current market rate. Then perhaps bury the aluminum scrap in your backyard, until an appropriate time to sell it.

Trouble with this as a long-term investment strategy is that we may only have cheap aluminum and aluminum cans as a throwaway product for a few years more. Still, the potential gain in the metal's cost or its usefulness as a barter/survival item is immense and well worth considering for someone who doesn't have much money and wants to prepare themselves financially for the peak oil economic havoc.

[metalcaster]

If your are going to store cans, melt them down now. A coke can is only 20% - 50% aluminium by weight, plus it takes energy to melt 'em and clean 'em, which might be very expensive post peak. Once they're in melted down into ingots they take up a lot less space. I've got two 100% coke-can ingots (2lb).

[bobaloo]

I have a unique method of storing it. I used to own a business that manufactured shortwave communications antennas, so I have a lot (several thousand pieces) of 12' long aluminum tube left over in my shop. This year I added four 4'X24' raised beds, so I decided to use 12' long sticks of 2" aluminum tube to make 8" high sides for the beds. The upside is they won't rot out like the boards I had been using, I just get a bit of a kick out of it thinking of the possible value of my raised beds in 20 or 30 years...

[dark-suzie]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('', ' ')The last two paragraphs stick in my mind the most. How long can it go on...

[oowolf]

To fill the cans with nutritionally worthless "diet" soda is just compounding the obscenity.

[AdamB]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Ebyss', 'A')greed, excellent post. Frightening too. I wonder how long it will take before PO affects this process, both in terms of end-product price and long term viability of the production method.