How do you make a can of Coke?
The Vons grocery store two miles from my home in Los Angeles, California sells 12 cans of Coca-Cola for $6.59 — 54 cents each. The tool chain that created this simple product is incomprehensibly complex.
Each can originated in a small town of 4,000 people on the Murray River in Western Australia called Pinjarra. Pinjarra is the site of the world’s largest bauxite mine. Bauxite is surface mined — basically scraped and dug from the top of the ground. The bauxite is crushed and washed with hot sodium hydroxide, which separates it into aluminum hydroxide and waste material called red mud. The aluminum hydroxide is cooled, then heated to over a thousand degrees celsius in a kiln, where it becomes aluminum oxide, or alumina. The alumina is dissolved in a molten substance called cryolite, a rare mineral first discovered in Greenland, and turned into pure aluminum using electricity in a process called electrolysis. The pure aluminum sinks to the bottom of the molten cryolite, is drained off and placed in a mold. It cools into the shape of a long cylindrical bar. The bar is transported west again, to the Port of Bunbury, and loaded onto a container ship bound for — in the case of Coke for sale in Los Angeles — Long Beach.
And that’s just the beginning. Great read.
Did this guy write this while watching an episode of “How It’s Made”?
As a qualified metallurgist there is so much wrong in this statement that I dont know where to start.
This is the problem with citizen journalism, basic failure to understand the absolute fucking basics.
Bauxite is a rock. It is a rock rich in mineral materials, of which Aluminium Oxide is but one component. It does not sink, in fact it floats. Aluminium once extracted from its constituent parts is a very light metal and fucking floats.
Cryolite is not the constituent part of Aluminium Oxide, its the swarf, or in laymans terms the shit that is discarded. And it is not a rare mineral, its in the fucking rocks that you kick out of your way to your fucking car.
Extracting Al from Al Oxide is hard. Al is an unstable metal. It required huge amounts of electricity to force the oxide from the bare Al atoms. As a metal Aluminium as a fantastic material but is about as viable as the fucking batteries in a toyota prius.
What you think is Aluminium is not Al, its a oxide, the surface of Al is so reactive that it would com bust in your face.
I like you.
And aluminum production and recycling is one of the most energy- intense processes in the world. So much for the miracle metal.