A family member drink lots of them. I recycle them but it is still wasteful.
What would you do with a soda can or with a lot of them?
Recycling them is the least wasteful option. Aluminum is one of the few materials that recycling actually lowers carbon footprint compared to harvesting raw. Melting them down is easy but there’s few practical applications beyond introductory metallurgy.
The real solution is to switch to soda stream and reusable bottles.
edit:
So I ran across this aluminum can Solar Heat Collector just now. There might be some opportunity to repurpose the cans for some use that’s carbon negative in the long term. But probably not feasible without specialized tools or skills.
Soda stream requires C02 canisters.
Yes they do.
But as someone who likes my bubbly I can attest that the soda stream cylinders do produce close to 60L of beverage, easily offsetting 150 cans per cylinder.
The cylinders also do not need to be melted down to be refilled.
About those solar heat collectors: I can confirm it works because I’ve built one. It’s not as efficient as collectors that use coolant and a compressor system, but it’s very reliable and cheap.
I will second the opinion about aluminum recycling. Making aluminum from alumina is very energy expensive. Melting down cans is efficient compared to that.
P.S.
Notes about cans: if one wishes to make a model engine (e.g. compressed air engine, Stirling engine, lightweight models that work but cannot produce practical amounts of energy), some soda cans fit inside each other with extremely tight clearances (on the order of micrometers) and there is no seal, they slide on a layer of air. Of course, they have to be cut (with scizzors) and have to be kept clean, and despite keeping clean, there is abrasion (they wear down).
It’s very hard to machine a part to those tolerances. If a piston-cylinder system does not have to withstand detonation (not an internal combustion engine) and doesn’t have to do heavy work or last long, cans are a neat way to quickly get matching pistons and cylinders for experimenting.
- example 1: piston 355 ml “Red Bull”, cylinder 330 ml generic can
- example 2: piston “Devil’s Bit” 500 ml, cylinder “Battery” 500 ml can
(examples cannot be relied on as manufacturers have different production lines and production batches)
I feel better recycling them until I convince them. Thank you.
Zero waste is hard when you share your home with people who don’t understand the why.
Getting 5-10 cents each is the most practical. Otherwise, you can melt them down and do sand casting for parts. That’s what my old metal shop class did.
Oh, and you really want a project, cut off the bottoms, take two to make an alcohol stove, then flatten the cylinder into squares and use them as roofing or siding.
Maybe I know someone crafty enough that would be interesting in doing that… Thank you for the ideas.
