How Aluminum Recycling Contributes To A Circular Economy
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APR 25, 2022

How Aluminum Recycling Contributes To A Circular Economy

Our current throwaway culture is costing the environment and your pocket, and we are creating more waste than this planet can handle. With recycling, you reduce the amount of pollution entering landfills, oceans, and our atmosphere. Scrap metal recycling with RCM Recycling helps your business become a sustainable builder for tomorrow that is good for you and our environment. RCM Recycling is a scrap metal company in the business of aluminum recycling and recycling all types of scrap metals.

Defining the Circular Economy

Rather than taking, making, and disposing, a circular economy follows a circular process. Consider these principles:

Design out waste and pollution: Keeping resources in use for as long as possible will allow you to generate the maximum amount of value from them. Hence the circular economy aims at minimizing waste and pollution. After each service life, it is necessary to recover and regenerate products and materials.

Keep products and materials in use: Producers should design their products durable and repairable, encourage reuse through leasing or sharing models, or remanufacture used versions of their products.

Regenerate natural systems: Even if we reduce our demand for virgin materials by making better use of what we have around us, we will still need new resources to meet demand. This is where recycling comes in. Recycling allows us to recover valuable materials at the end of a product's life so they can be used again.

Relationship Between Aluminum and the Circular Economy

Among all the metals, aluminum is one of the most common ones in the Earth's crust and it is derived from the bauxite ore. Aluminum is favored for its lightweight and corrosion resistance and can be recycled many times. In terms of recycling, aluminum has the highest recovery rate at more than 60 percent due to its many different uses in our everyday lives. Since aluminum is so versatile and has a high recycling rate, aluminum recycling has been widely adopted into a circular economy.

Circular economies eliminate waste and pollution by reusing resources as long as possible. This can be done by reusing products or recycling them with a scrap metal company before being sent to a landfill. The traditional linear economy focuses on making, using, and disposing of products with little thought about what happens after their use ends.

What Products Contain Aluminum

Aluminum is used so often because of its durability and versatility, and it can be repurposed repeatedly. Look around your house or office. You'll find aluminum everywhere.

The most obvious aluminum products are soda cans and food packagings like foil and pie plates. But aluminum has many more applications than just packaging.

For example, in a car, aluminum is used to make the engine block and cylinder head (for lighter weight and better performance), wheels (for durability), seat frames (for strength), wheel covers (for aesthetics), and even decorative trim pieces like door handles.

Think of the recycling possibilities!

Scrap Metal Recycling With RCM Recycling

The aluminum industry is leading the way to a Circular Economy that provides sustainable solutions, including recycling. Aluminum can be recycled indefinitely; its reuse and recycling help the environment. Aluminum is used to produce a wide range of products, such as beverage cans, automotive parts, and building materials.

Contact RCM Recycling for more information about how recycling aluminum contributes to the Circular Economy.