The two lives of a drink can

By JACKLYN SIRIAS
WHEN you take a can of soft drink, how do you dispose of the empty?
Frank Butler, from the non-government organisation PNG Help, says that in order to understand how used drink cans (UDC) end up under one’s feet at one’s favourite beach, for example, one first has to know its life cycle.
“Aluminium cans start life as the mineral bauxite which is mined, in our case mostly in Australia . . . it takes about five tonnes of bauxite to make one tonne of aluminium, and one tonne of aluminium will produce a little over 80,000 cans.
“To create the aluminium, huge amounts of electrical energy are used, so as you can see it is a resource-intensive process.”
He says the good thing about aluminium is that it is light and strong and can be recycled endlessly without being degraded.
“Nine-tonne rolls of aluminium sheets are punched into hand-sized discs and then extruded (punched and drawn out) to make the can shape.
“This is then printed and filled with your favourite sugary beverage, a lid is added with an opening tab and the can and its contents are sent off to a store near you.
“Now comes the interesting part . . . ideally after the cold, delicious contents of the can have been consumed, it will then enter the recycling chain.
“The empty cans will be placed in a general waste bin and later will be sorted and separated into a recycle bin or if we are lucky, it will be placed directly in a recycling bin and taken directly to the recycling yard.”
But in Papua New Guinea the process usually takes a different route, as Butler outlines:
“It will be collected by an aluminium seller (the men or women who make a living collecting cans from various places) and taken to be sold at a recycling yard or an organised collection point.
“Here the cans are weighed and money changes hands, at the moment it’s about K1.80 per kilo for cans.
“People try all sorts of tricks to increase the weight of the cans at this stage, a few pebbles ,a scoop of sand or a few drops of water can be added, that is why the recyclers (the people who buy the cans) like the cans to be crushed, so they are only paying for aluminium.”
Butler says that once the cans are sold at the yard, they are fed into a hydraulic compactor and squashed into a bail, which can weigh between 20 and 40 kilograms, depending on the size and the amount of squashing that has taken place.
These are then loaded into a shipping container to be shipped off to whoever is paying the best price for scrap aluminium that week.
“From PNG the cans usually go to South Korea, Singapore or China,” Butler says. “The cans are then melted down again and rolled out into nine-tonne rolls of aluminium sheet and the process starts again.”
Butler says that if the empties continue to be collected, crushed, sold and new cans produced then the system is working. But if there is a slack somewhere – meaning that people are not collecting cans, or the cans are not going into recycling bins but are instead floating out to sea, for example,  then bauxite has to be mined, smelted and extracted so that the chain can be maintained. If the chain of recycling continues, then there is no need to mine bauxite to make new aluminium cans.
“We are saving money and saving energy and ultimately saving our planet,” says Butler. “If, however, the can ends up washed up under your feet on your favourite beach or wedged in a coral reef or strewn on a sand bar, well in that case the system has failed, money has been lost, energy wasted and the planet trashed.
“This is a very brief history of the two possible lives of a drink can, which one would you choose?”