aluminium packaging
in products is around 30 years. As long as materials like aluminium can be economically and ecologically reprocessed from old products, the scrap material will be processed into new products within a very short time. There are no ifs and buts: it represents a virtually perfect reprocessing and production cycle. A sustainable aluminium processing loop is an excellent way of protecting resources.
How credible are marketing slogans? The aluminium industry is coming under ever-increasing pressure from food and drink manufacturers to specify the recycled metal content of its products, in order to enhance salability whilst adhering to ecological issues in an eye- catching way.
Simple-to-grasp advertising messages like “household foil made from 100% recycled aluminium”, are all the rage, yet if all aluminium products were to claim this in order to appear “greener”, it would in fact become necessary to artificially increase the proportion of production scrap. Only in this way would it be possible to achieve the higher share of recycled metal necessary to label an end- product truly 100% "green". This gives rise, however, to the question of whether this production approach would actually make ecological
common sense? After all, in this case the resource efficiency would be exactly the opposite of what industry and society should be aiming for. Stefan Glimm comments: “Even if we do have the technology to manufacture a given product entirely from recycled scrap, this is ecologically and economically paradoxical. The prices for secondary raw materials, and thus the final market price, would rise considerably if all manufacturers were to adopt this approach.” What’s more, the simple fact is that there is not enough aluminium scrap available to satisfy today’s total demand for aluminium. In 2008 the total aluminium demand worldwide amounted to 47 million tonnes. This demand was met by 37 million tonnes of primary aluminium and just 10 million tonnes of available scrap.
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sector). In the short term this has resulted in the current demand for aluminium exceeding the availability of this resource from scrap metal. A massive increase in the demand for aluminium scrap would mean a drastic rise in the purchase costs for used metal – without even the slightest ecological benefit. Therefore - not all attention-grabbing ‘green’ messages are supported by a long-term sustainability factor.
Artifical markets are no solution Today’s prices for aluminium scrap are essentially based on a generally optimised aluminium- recycling market. The creation of “artificial” markets and material flows designed to satisfy specific inputs for a given product, must inevitably lead to a suboptimal allocation of the resources, resulting in increases in overall
Increasing pressure is being applied to the international political stage, over claims to genuine “sustainability”.
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Two factors are of essential importance in this regard: the growth of the market over the past few decades and the useful life of aluminium (about six months for a beverage can, twelve years in cars, and in excess of 50 years in railway systems and the construction
transportation distances and in the related burden on the environment. To improve the ecological sustainability of aluminium further still, it makes much more sense to further develop the methods of collection and recovery of aluminium products at the end of their useful lives. From an
overall ecological perspective, it is inappropriate to accuse a manufacturer of being unethical simply because his products contain only a small share of recycled aluminium. It could, however, be suggested that he is doing too little to promote the sustainability of production and consumption if he is not making every effort to ensure that the aluminium is fed back into the material loop after it has been used.
Greater awareness for genuine recycling Stefan Glimm of the GDA summarises: “Instead of chasing after simple recycling messages and propagating ecologically questionable indicators such as ‘recycled metal content’, the aluminium industry pleads the case that the material loop should be closed further still to promote greater sustainability in the production and consumption of the metal.
“This path enhances sustainability and benefits the environment. Ultimately, it also ensures that both the aluminium industry and its customers retain their credibility by actively supporting ecological processes which contribute towards sustainable production and consumption. This should be our common goal.”
*Source: Marlen Bertram, Kenneth J. Martchek and Georg Rombach; Material Flow Analysis in the Aluminium Industry
Packaging Gazette 21
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