Page 40 - Curriculum Visions Dynamic Book

Why recycling is vital
Aluminium is essential to many kinds of manufacturing, but making it from bauxite ore requires a great deal of expensive energy. In countries that refine aluminium, one-hundredth of all the electricity made in power stations may be used to run the refineries. It takes about 14 kilowatt-hours to refine each kilogram of alumina. (About the same as 14 single-bar electric fires running for one hour).
 Recycled aluminium cast into blocks.
But once aluminium has been refined and used,
it can be melted down and recycled using just
one-twentieth of the energy it took to make it in the first place. By saving this amount of energy, not only can resources like coal and oil be saved, but less carbon dioxide (a greenhouse gas) and sulphur and nitrogen oxides (acid rain gases) are released by power stations. For all these reasons it makes sense to recycle.
Recycling now accounts for about one-half of the total use of aluminium.
 A few cans thrown in a waste basket may not seem very relevant to saving the world’s aluminium resources...
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