16 April 2015

The engineering of an aluminum can


It's more complicated (and more elegant, and more interesting) than you may realize.

2 comments:

  1. There is nowhere in my area to which I can take my aluminum cans for recycling. I wish the stores would reinstitute a deposit on beverage containers so that people would quit throwing them away in my lawn and on the roadsides and so that fewer containers would wind up in landfills. The same could hold true for plastic containers -- think of all the oil we could save.

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    1. We have that here in Germany - had them on reusable bottles since quite a while, and in the 00s a deposit on one-way containers like cans was introduced. While from my experience the amount of beverages sold in cans plumetted in the aftermath, but has been recuperating ever since. Apparently there is a discussion about the introduction of the new deposit reducing the market share of real reusable containers (partly due to people not realizing that a deposit does NOT in fact mean that the container is reusable and thus ecofriendly) so i don´t know if I would call it a success.
      Probably there are less cans around littering parks and such, but I would wager it has been replaced by other refuse.

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