Design Talk with Steve Kelsey: There's no sense in sending metal to landfill

I met a string theorist this summer at a café in Dorset. He was a strange chap: tall, scruffy and generally incomprehensible with a propensity to talk big numbers.

Did you know that string theory predicts there are 10 to the 500 universes in existence right now? That’s a 10 with 500 noughts after it. My mind was thoroughly boggled and some unkind souls would argue it has yet to recover.

Landfill landmark
However, not to be outdone by a scientist, and as packaging is not a stranger to grand numbers, I went looking for something equally impressive. I am pleased to report I came up with a corker. Did you know that this summer the trillionth metal can went to landfill in the United States?

This is so large a number as to be as meaningless as string theory, so I had a look at what you could build with the approximately 11 million tonnes of aluminium that represents. Lots is the simple answer. For instance, you could build 27,500 Boeing 747s, which is more than 20 times larger than Boeing’s total production number.

But jumbo jets are also too big to be a useful example, so how about something smaller, like a car? It turns out that you could build five and a half million Audi A8s for the same amount of metal, or about four and a half billion Mac PowerBooks.
That’s two each for every child in the world today.

As this precious metal has been thoughtlessly lobbed on to tips around the US and not recycled, it also represents 79,970,000 megawatt-hours of electricity, which is another number so large as to lose all meaning. But just a minute, a patriot might retort, that’s the US and we all know they are wastrels.

That’s fine if you are just thinking about the situation here in the UK, but unfortunately for us we are in Europe, sort of. In terms of population Europe is bigger than the US so I have no reason to believe our numbers would be any less daunting. After all, what’s a few million laptops between wealthy friends?

Binning ban
All these numbers help to put in perspective the importance of the Courtauld 2’s proposition that not a single precious gram of this infinitely flexible metal should be lost to landfill. This is an argument that encompasses any refined and optimised material, not just aluminium.

If we are truly going to make progress on recycling materials, banning all highly developed resources from landfill is a very sensible first step on the path to sanity.

Steve Kelsey is strategic innovations director at PI Global. Send comments for Steve to packagingnews.editorial@haymarket.com