Everyone likes watching their favorite shows on television whether it’s a cartoon, your daily soap opera, or the evening news. Most people also like to conserve energy, so recycle your aluminum cans. What’s the connection between television, energy, and an aluminum can? Throw out an aluminum can and you are wasting the energy equivalent of 3 hours worth of TV viewing. An aluminum can takes 200-500 years to decompose as litter. So, please, recycle your aluminum cans.

What happens to that can once it has found its way to the recycle bin? It is sorted and then shipped to an aluminum company, where it is shredded, crushed and stripped of it’s inside and outside decorations via a burning process. Then, the potato chip-sized pieces of aluminum are loaded into melting furnaces, where the recycled metal is blended with new, virgin aluminum.

The molten aluminum is then poured into 25-foot long ingots, or molds. The resulting metal bar can weigh over 30,000 pounds. These bars are fed into rolling mills that reduce the thickness of the metal from 20-plus inches to sheets that are about 10/1,000 of an inch thick.

This metal is then coiled and shipped to can makers, who produce can bodies and lids.  The bodies, or sides of a can, are the same thickness as a human hair! After the cans are formed, they are shipped to beverage companies where they are filled with soft drinks and juices and then delivered to your local supermarket shelf.

This whole process can take as little as 60 days! Please keep recycling your aluminum cans.