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Recycling - Aluminum Dilemma

1,665 gallons of gas for 1 ton of pop cans?

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According to the EPA, recycling one ton of aluminum cans saves 1,665 gallons of gasoline. If that is accurate it makes recycling popcans very important. After a simple measurment and a calculation this means for every 10 pop cans you recycle, you save about 1 quart of gasoline (it was actually around 29% of a gallon, but I took off some for freight and recycling processes). if each American household saved 10 more popcans per week we would save 13 billion gallons of gasoline per year. That means that America could save 10% of its gasoline use(120 billion gallons per year). In fact, this is a few percent of the entire worlds gasoline saved. Do you buy that? I'm wasn't sure, so...

I checked. I found that this is most likely quite true. I found out that it takes a whopping 15.7 KWH to smelt alumina into 1 kilogram of aluminum. The numbers seem to hold up for the EPA's assertion. But, I wasn't about to take anyones word for it. You have to find things out for yourself.

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