The Story of Stuff - Annie Leonard [57]
What’s that? You’re waving the white flag of recycling? Well, the fact is, all the attention paid to recycling in the past few decades has given Americans an inflated idea of how much aluminum is being recycled. That, and some clever manipulation of the numbers by the aluminum industry.*
While it’s true that cans are 100 percent recyclable, aluminum recycling in the United States has been on the decline for decades. We’re recycling about 45 percent of cans today, down from 54.5 percent in 2000 and the peak rate of 65 percent in 1992.90 In part this is because Americans are spending ever more time commuting and consuming beverages on the go, while there are few recycling bins in places away from home like the mall, the movie theater, the airport, etc. It’s also because we still only have bottle bills, which place a 2.5-to 10-cent deposit on each can and bottle, in a mere ten states across the country.91 In Brazil, meanwhile, there’s an impressive 87 percent recycling rate for beverage containers because many people rely on the income from collecting them.92 Given rising levels of unemployment stateside, you’d think we might follow Brazil’s example.
As the Container Recycling Institute points out, widespread subsidies for virgin aluminum also detract from recycling: “Because of long-term, cut-rate energy contracts, below-market water rates, the easy acquisition of government lands for mining, and a myriad of tax breaks and infrastructural assistance, aluminum companies have perhaps been less vulnerable to global economic forces than some other primary industries. [This has] enabled the world aluminum primary industry to expand capacity ahead of demand. As long as excess primary aluminum production capacity exists on the global market, and as long as the cost of making virgin ingot remains low, scrap prices will remain suppressed.”93
In fact, it’s estimated that more than a trillion aluminum cans have been trashed in landfills since 1972, when records started being kept. If those cans were dug up, they’d be worth about $21 billion in today’s scrap prices.94 In 2004 alone, more than 800,000 tons of cans were landfilled in the United States (and 300,000 tons in the rest of the world).95 As a Worldwatch report pointed out, “that’s like five smelters pouring their entire annual output—a million tons of metal—straight into a hole in the ground. Had those cans been recycled, 16 billion kilowatt hours could have been saved—enough electricity for more than two million European homes for a year.”96
I saw a great depiction of the irrationality of aluminum beverage cans when I was working on waste issues in Budapest in 2007. HuMuSz, an organization there that raises awareness about waste, had made a series of short, entertaining films that play before feature films in Hungarian movie theaters. My favorite film took place in a WALL-E-like, totally trashed planet Earth of the future, where aliens arrive to conduct research. They find one remaining human being and grill him for answers about the incredibly valuable and widely dispersed pieces of aluminum strewn about the planet, convinced these were used for communications, military, or medical purposes. When the human replies that they were for singleuse servings of sugary, carbonated drinks, the aliens berate him for lying: “No one would be so stupid, so irrational to use such a highly valuable, energy-intensive metal to hold a simple beverage!” I’m with the aliens on this one.
For once, the solution is incredibly straightforward. If we cut out the absurd, frivolous use of aluminum as a container for our beverages, we can put the tons of aluminum already in circulation into Stuff that makes sense, like to replace some steel to lighten up our modes of transportation,