This guy pinches

Mostly correct, although the part about pure aluminum not corroding is absolutely incorrect. Pure aluminum corrodes very quickly, but it's oxide doesn't flake and fall off like rust on iron. The outside of pure aluminum quickly corrodes in our atmosphere creating a very thin skin of an aluminum oxide. This thin layer provides a barrier that prevents oxygen from getting further into the aluminum and corroding the interior.

Thank you all for the answers!

Processing ore to produce aluminum is expensive.

Recycling (remelting) aluminum is easy and rather inexpensive.

The original poster is missing an "it" before the "is", but that shouldn't render the sentence incomprehensive.

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> While it's incredibly expensive to refine from the earth is 100% recyclable.

Huh?

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Yeah, it's as common as dirt, literally.

Basically "unsolved things" which are subconsciously being remembered.

https://youtu.be/ZK79c2PqUWs

Not really vapor loss, but there typically is some loss to oxidation. Alu binds very tightly to oxygen, which is also the reason why it takes so much energy to refine from ore in the first place. Aluminium exposed to air instantly forms a thin oxide layer, which is a bit more difficult to recycle than "just melt it". Pretty sure even this oxide dross is worth recycling though, it's basically very high grade ore.

I'm married to one of these people...I think of it like professional sport coaches or managers....they get fired a lot! Sometimes it's not even anything they did, just someone else bought the company and wants their own person in charge. My spouse's highest annual income, 7 figures USD...was the year they were made redundant.

I believe they say it’s 100 km because some guy named karman figured out that you would need to be moving at orbital speeds to generate enough lift and it was around 100 km

Let’s put it like this:

It is abundant… but…!

But it’s one of the metal the loves the most to oxidize and react with all sort of things in nature. Once you make it pure, it stays pure and does not corrode past its surface, In nature however, it is four mixed with all sort of things to which it loves to stick.

So the process of getting new aluminum requires to melt and process a lot of rock, discarding the most of it and keep some aluminum oxide. This requires to melt a lot of stuff. Then you have to convince that oxide to let go the oxygen it loves to stick to, so you can get pure aluminum. This requires a lot of electricity.

Basically finding aluminum is not an issue, but the amount of energy needed to purify it (read it as coal, gas, oil to burn to get that energy) is very big.

I would have figured there would be vapor loss during the heating.

This is good. I would just add that in many cases companies will make a severance payment in exchange for a waiver of claims. Better to pay someone $5k or $10k to leave on good terms than have them leave on bad term and find a lawyer to bring a wrongful termination claim. That amount can be plowed through very quickly in legal fees.

Aluminum is an element. The aluminum stays aluminum forever. You may have some “loss” by having it drip out of a melting vessel or something like that, but 100% of the aluminum still exists. Just sweep it up when it cools and put it in the next batch.

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How is that possible? There has to be some sort of loss. 100% is 100%.

Duh, just go to the front yard. Democracy wins again!!!

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If you look at the abundance of elements in earth's crust aluminum is #3. It we use the CRC number from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abundance_of_elements_in_Earth%27s_crust we have

• Oxygen 46%
• Silicon 28%
• Aluminium 8.2%
• Iron 5.6%

So there is an enormous amount of aluminum. Most of it we use are in the for mof bauxite that is aluminum o

Aluminum is also recycled to a high degree. The primary reason is not the availability of bauxite ore. The primary reason is that the energy required to of recycling is 5% of the energy required to make it from ore. Aluminum requires a huge amount of electric energy to refine.

36% of the aluminum produced in the US comes from scrap. Globally the recycling rate is around 76% and it is estimated that 75% of all aluminum ever produced is still in usage.

To add to this, despite being in 8% of the Earth's crust, aluminum used to be very rare in it's natural state. Producing aluminum from ore used to be so difficult that it was more expensive than silver.

When the Washington Monument was finished in 1884, they placed atop it an aluminum primid lighting rod. It was the largest single piece of aluminum cast at the time. 2 years later the Hall-Héroult process was discovered, which allowed aluminum to be made quite cheaply.

Basically the method for extracting aluminium from raw ore is the same way as recycling it except that recycling contains a much purer form of aluminium and produces less waste so it is a lot cheaper to process recycled aluminium than to extract aluminium from aluminium oxide or bauxite.

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While it's incredibly expensive to refine from the earth is 100% recyclable. You don't lose anything when you melt recycled aluminum.