Sarah FitzGerald visits Wise Recycling

Wise Recycling is a chain of metal recycling plants. I visited the plant in Clayton, North Carolina. While visiting the plant, I saw they recycled all manner of metals excluding the precious metals, such as gold and silver. This plant focuses on aluminum, steel and copper. To the left is a picture of me in front of a pile of irony extrusion, one of the "grades" of aluminum. There are different types of aluminum, and they separate them by quality and purity. Most metals are crushed into bales, in the picture on the right, I am standing in front of a 4,000 lb bale of number one (pure) copper. Cans are called UBC for uncrushed beverage cans, and so many are recycled each day at the plant, that rather than crush them into bales, they are shredded and shot directly into tractor trailers. The man who gave me the tour told me that they sent out roughly a full tractor-trailer worth of aluminum can shreds a day, and he told me that well over a million pounds of metal are moved through the plant every month.

Recycling aluminum saves energy, and saves 95% of the energy that would have otherwise been needed to make new aluminum from ore. Four pounds of bauxite ore would be needed for every one pound of aluminum that is not recycled. Bauxite ore, the ore aluminum is created from, is found lying flat near the Earth’s surface over long stretches, sometimes many miles. In mining for the bauxite ore the vegetation in the area is destroyed, habitats are lost, and there is more soil erosion due to the open pit mining method that is used. Carbon dioxide, perfluorocarbons, sodium fluoride, sulfur dioxide, polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbon and quite a few other harmful gases are released in the smelting and processing of bauxite ore. The EPS says that the perfluorocarbons that are released during the initial smelting process to turn bauxite ore into aluminum are 9,200 times more harmful than carbon dioxide when it comes to their affect on global warming. Recycling greatly reduces the amount of these toxins released into the atmosphere.