this post was submitted on 01 Apr 2026
450 points (99.8% liked)
Microblog Memes
11255 readers
1634 users here now
A place to share screenshots of Microblog posts, whether from Mastodon, tumblr, ~~Twitter~~ X, KBin, Threads or elsewhere.
Created as an evolution of White People Twitter and other tweet-capture subreddits.
RULES:
- Your post must be a screen capture of a microblog-type post that includes the UI of the site it came from, preferably also including the avatar and username of the original poster. Including relevant comments made to the original post is encouraged.
- Your post, included comments, or your title/comment should include some kind of commentary or remark on the subject of the screen capture. Your title must include at least one word relevant to your post.
- You are encouraged to provide a link back to the source of your screen capture in the body of your post.
- Current politics and news are allowed, but discouraged. There MUST be some kind of human commentary/reaction included (either by the original poster or you). Just news articles or headlines will be deleted.
- Doctored posts/images and AI are allowed, but discouraged. You MUST indicate this in your post (even if you didn't originally know). If an image is found to be fabricated or edited in any way and it is not properly labeled, it will be deleted.
- Absolutely no NSFL content.
- Be nice. Don't take anything personally. Take political debates to the appropriate communities. Take personal disagreements & arguments to private messages.
- No advertising, brand promotion, or guerrilla marketing.
RELATED COMMUNITIES:
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
From looking it up, it seems like making new aluminum from alumina ore is a massively energy intensive process, whereas recycling aluminum is just about melting it so takes a lot less energy.
It seems like, if the demand were there, it would be easy to make ultra pure aluminum from beer cans etc. It's just that right now there's enough demand for lower purity aluminum that the recyclers aren't bothering to chase the market for the ultra-pure stuff.
According to my friend who used to work with that stuff, the bigger "problem" is mostly with regulations and balancing the risks; the damage potential of an aircraft accident (loss of life, brand reputation, recalls, etc) is exponentially more expensive than however much you'd save in production costs. Closed-loop recycling is usually the focus instead. But it would of course be cool.
At least that's kinda Airbuses viewpoint on it. Boeing on the other hand might be fine with delivering dodgy stuff and bribing away any possible fines ;)
It makes sense if everything that comes out of a ore-to-aluminum system is very pure whereas the stuff that comes out of a recycler isn't guaranteed to be as pure. You could probably set up some kind of quality control pipeline to ensure that the recycled stuff you were buying was top purity. But, that would add expense. It's also an untried way of doing things, whereas the ore-to-aluminum pipeline is probably well known and trusted.
There's probably a price where it makes sense, either ultra-pure recycled aluminum gets cheap enough that it's worth switching, or the aluminum that comes from ore is too expensive. But, until then the current system works and nobody wants to potentially be blamed for causing a crash by trying to save some money.