Novelis is the world's largest recycler of
used beverage cans. They arrive at its factory in Warrington,
England from all over the world. Compressed into bails, each weighing up to
1,000 kilograms and containing as many as 65,000 aluminium cans. Every year we save enough energy recycling
aluminium cans, cars, tools, even planes, to run the whole of India. The bales of compressed cans are loaded onto
a conveyor and fed into a 340 horsepower shredder. Aluminium is tricky to sort because unlike
some metals, it can't be separated out with a magnet. So next, the shredded scrap passes through
an optical sorter at a rate of three meters per second. The machine uses infrared sensors to sort
out what's metal and what isn't. Then blasts away any plastic or glass with
jets of air. A powerful magnet sucks up any scraps of steel,
leaving just aluminium. We Brits say aluminium. And the Americans say aluminum. But who's right? Well, Sir Humphrey Davey, the British guy
who discovered it in 1807, he wrote down the name as alumium, which no one calls it. Then he changed it to aluminum, and he changed
it again to aluminium. So, either he didn't know what to call it
or he just couldn't spell. It's aluminium. Aluminum. The next problem is, aluminium doesn't melt
until 660 degrees. The paint and laquer aren't so lucky. They're instantly vaporised. The clean aluminium chips are ready for the
next stage, melting. Two furnaces hit a blistering 730 degrees. And handle up to 100 tons of aluminium each. The trouble is, when the aluminium melts,
it reacts with air forming a layer of aluminium oxide that floats on top. This unwanted oxide is known as dross. A brave furnace operator skims it off with
a giant, steel spatula. And the alloy is ready for the casting area. The only problem is getting there. A river of molten metal flows downhill to
a holding furnace that's the size of a double decker bus. Somehow, they need to pour the liquid metal
into a mold. Remarkably, the solution is to tip the entire
furnace. And a fountain of deadly metal pours into
one of three molds set ten meters into the ground. Inside, they will be cast into three towering
blocks of aluminium. After two and a half hours they have three
giant aluminium monoliths, called ingots. Each one is ten meters long, weighs 27 tons
and is made up of 1.5 million recycled cans. Aluminium, or aluminum, is not expensive because
it's rare. In fact, it's the most common metal in the
Earth's crust. It's expensive because it's so hard to extract
from the rock around it. 150 years ago, it was more expensive than
gold. Today, demand for aluminium is so high the
ingots don't lie around. Their transformation back into cans starts
with a 900 kilometre journey to a rolling mill in Germany. Here, they're heated in another furnace to
525 degrees. This relaxes the bonds between the aluminium
atoms, releasing any stresses within the ingot. Then it's passed back and forth through a
series of rollers. It's a bit like rolling pastry. Each set of rollers thins out the metal until
it's a quarter of a millimeter thick and 10,000 meters long. That's 1,000 times its original length. Massive reels of the aluminium arrive back
in the UK at Ball Packaging to undergo reconversion into cans and possibly something a little
more out of this world. We've got three basic product categories,
beverage packaging, household metal packaging, and we also have an aerospace division. So, the interesting thing of course is manufacturing
beverage cans is rocket science. The aluminium alloys for rockets are very
similar to the ones used for cans. So theoretically, your old can could be on
its way to space. Meanwhile, on planet Earth, they feed the
sheets of aluminium into a rapid fire cupping press. This heavyweight knocks out thousands of shallow
cups. The secret of turning them into cans is a
tight squeeze. Every cup is rammed through a series of rings,
each narrower than the last. Forcing the aluminium through the rings squeezes
it into a cylinder and a new can is born. The very first time anyone put a beverage
in an aluminum can it was beer, it was in the US, and it was 1959. And even back then, they still recycled, you
got a cent for every can you brought back. They produce around 6 and a half million cans
here every day, and send them all over the world. That's a whole lot of aluminium. Luckily, there's plenty more where these came
from.
