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Life of an Aluminium Can - Contenido educativo
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They say it's important to recycle aluminum cans, but why?
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The answer starts under the Earth's crust.
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In tropical areas, miners dig for bauxite, the reddish rock aluminum comes from.
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Bauxite is a raw material, so a refining plant has to wash and grind it up to extract alumina,
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which is then heated and filtered into a white powder.
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After adding electricity and carbon, you get liquid aluminum.
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Once it's cast into a solid block form called an ingot,
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aluminum is heated up, pressed thin, and punched into circles called blanks.
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The blanks are then shaped around forms into cans.
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That's when it finally looks like the cans you see in stores and vending machines.
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It takes a lot of work and materials to make just a single can,
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which is why recycling is so important.
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Putting a can in the trash means it ends up in a landfill,
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where its valuable resources take up space underground and become unusable.
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Littering is even more destructive, wasting our natural resources
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and creating a negative impact on our communities, wildlife and environment.
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But recycling a can enables these natural resources to continue doing something useful.
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After being put in a recycling bin,
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aluminum cans get hauled to a Materials Recovery Facility or MRF
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or MRF, where recyclables are dumped, put on a line,
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and sorted.
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Conveyors run in all different directions,
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at different speeds, and with different sized gaps
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and screens to make sure each type of material
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ends up in its own place.
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The separation process uses the varying weights and shapes
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of each material.
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Paper, for example, moves through a disk screen
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to be separated.
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The screen allows heavier items, like containers,
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to fall to the lowest levels.
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Plastics are sorted by a combo of high-tech machines and people hand-sorting at the line.
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And most metals are sorted by magnets.
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Since aluminum cans are not attracted to magnets,
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aluminum is one of the metals left behind after the steel and tin cans are sorted out.
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A special device quickly spins underneath the conveyor,
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which creates an electric current conducted by lots of different types of magnets,
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creating something called an eddy current.
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The eddy current repels the aluminum cans so strongly that it flings them up to their own section of the facility.
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From there, aluminum goes down its own conveyor line, is compacted into bales, and is finally sent to an aluminum reclaiming plant.
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After being cleaned and melted down, aluminum cans can be recycled again and again into brand new cans or other useful items.
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Aluminum never loses its quality or physical properties through this process.
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and making new aluminum cans from used cans takes 95% less energy than making a new can from origin
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materials so aluminum is definitely worth saving from landfills or drifting around as
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litter the simple act of recycling one aluminum can gives it new life and makes a big impact
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- Idioma/s:
- Autor/es:
- José Vicente
- Subido por:
- José Vicente S.
- Licencia:
- Reconocimiento - No comercial - Compartir igual
- Visualizaciones:
- 68
- Fecha:
- 10 de noviembre de 2020 - 21:28
- Visibilidad:
- Público
- Centro:
- CP INF-PRI LORENZO LUZURIAGA
- Duración:
- 03′ 07″
- Relación de aspecto:
- 1.78:1
- Resolución:
- 1280x720 píxeles
- Tamaño:
- 15.68 MBytes