Aluminium Recycling Today: How Aluminium Has Become Valuable In Scrap Metal Recycling

• 11 May 2023
• by Melbourne Metal Recycling
• 0 Comments

The recycling of discarded metal products has been the go-to solution for companies in preserving resources and achieving sustainability. Businesses benefit from metal recycling in a lot of ways. For one, metal recycling does not need to consume a lot of energy, making it more economic compared to extracting new metal materials and using them to create new products. Another key benefit of metal recycling is that it causes less damage to the environment. Quarries and mines will be fewer now that scrap metal products are recycled and reused, eliminating the need to get raw metal materials.

One type of metal that is being recycled today is aluminium. The history of aluminium and its recyclability have come a long way ever since the material was discovered. But one can truly believe that aluminium recycling has helped in establishing the foundation of sustainable living on the planet.

Extracting Raw Aluminium Metal

Despite the wide presence of aluminium products today, most people do not have any idea of how aluminium is extracted from the ground. You see, aluminium was only discovered in 1825, and one major reason why it is not utilised right away is due to the rarity of the material. In its purest form, aluminium can only be found and extracted from bauxite, a red-brown ore. For the aluminium to be successfully extracted, the bauxite must be melted with a mineral and subjected to an electric current to remove oxygen from the contained aluminium material.

Four tons of bauxite can typically produce one ton of aluminium, which is too little considering that the process of extraction can be time-consuming and taxing. In comparison, recycling aluminium products will only cost 5% of the energy used for extracting aluminium from the bauxite.

The Aluminium Recycling Industry

The continuous development behind the whole metal recycling industry gave way to different ways of recycling, reprocessing, and reusing scrap metal materials. Most frequently, businesses that revolve around scrap metal recycling will initially focus on obtaining the maximum amount of scrap aluminium products so that they can recycle them and get profit out of selling them. They even coordinate with the government to ensure that most scrap aluminium products are collected. The aluminium recycling industry is now becoming a need for most manufacturing companies since it can save a lot of resources.

With the help of the aluminium recycling industry, it is estimated that around 75% of aluminium products ever created around the world are still in circulation today. To put it simply, around 75% of raw aluminium materials that are extracted from bauxite before are still used in different industries today.

Products Made from Aluminium

Different industries utilise aluminium products. One of them is the automotive industry. It uses aluminium in manufacturing components of aircraft, vehicles, trucks, trains, and ships. Building and construction industries also use aluminium in creating façade panels, roofing panels, structural profiles, window frames, and many more. Packaging products such as cans, bottles, aluminium foil, food trays, aerosol containers, tubes, cartridges, and bottle closures are also made from aluminium.

Aluminium products, indeed, are widely used by different industries today. Through the aluminium recycling industry, the principles of scrap metal recycling have truly promoted and instilled the importance of conserving non-renewable materials as well as time, money, and energy. If you want to have your scrap aluminium products recycled and reprocessed, feel free to call us at Melbourne Metal Recycling.