Story of Aluminium

Global society faces a great challenge to shift human economic activity and lifestyles on to a sustainable path in the 21st century, including meeting threats from climate change. The story of the aluminium industry over the decades ahead must be one of how it is part of the solution for a sustainable future.
This century began with an estimated 6 billion people on the planet, up six-fold in just 200 years from 1 billion in the year 1800. The United Nations currently expects global population to peak around 2050 at about 9 billion.

The sustainability challenge shared by all nations, industries and communities is to provide not only for the basic needs of all of these people, but to meet their expectations for improving quality of life. Crucially, this socio-economic progress must be achieved while ensuring that the natural environment remains ecologically viable and able to meet the needs of future generations as well as current ones.

The products of human ingenuity, including industrial creations such as the versatile metal aluminium, have a vital role to play in successfully addressing this sustainability challenge. To do its part, the aluminium industry needs to minimize environmental, social and economic negatives and maximize the positives across its life-cycle – from pre-mining to post-consumer stages - delivering a clear net benefit to society.

Why Aluminium?
The demand for aluminium products is increasing year by year, so why is aluminium a metal in such demand and what is its role in the lives of future generations?

Aluminium is a young material, and in the little more than a century since its first commercial production, it has become the world’s second most used metal after steel. Aluminium is the metal of choice for leading designers, architects and engineers, all of whom are looking for a material which combines functionality and cost-effectiveness with forward looking form and design potential.

Aluminium is an extraordinarily versatile material. The range of forms it can take (castings, extrusions and tubes, sheet & plate, foil, powder, forgings etc) and variety of surface finishes available (coatings, anodizing, polishing etc) means it lends itself to a wide range of products, many of which we use every day of our lives.

As well as its versatile form, the metal’s light weight (33% that of steel) and numerous material qualities – represented by a wide range of alloys – mean that products have been designed for use in all areas of modern life. It is a good conductor of electricity (one kilogram of aluminium cable can carry twice as much electricity as one kilogram of copper) and most overhead and many underground transmission lines are made of aluminium. It transmits conducted heat and reflects radiant heat, making it an excellent medium from which to produce cooking utensils and foils, radiators and building insulation. Its strength, combined with low density, make it ideal for transport and packaging applications. Aluminium is a unique metal: strong, durable, flexible, impermeable, lightweight, corrosion-resistant and 100 percent recyclable.

Aluminium is the third most abundant element in the earth's crust and constitutes 7.3% by mass. In nature however it only exists in very stable combinations with other materials (particularly as silicates and oxides). While there were some historical mentions of aluminium use, it was not until 1808 that its existence was first established. It then took many years of painstaking research to "unlock" the metal from its ore - the hard, reddish and clay-like bauxite. Further years of experimentation finally, in 1854, saw the development of a viable, commercial production process.

Aluminium is a young metal, having only been produced commercially for 153 years. Despite the fact that copper, lead and tin have been in use for thousands of years, today more aluminium is produced than all other non-ferrous metals combined. Its unique combination of properties makes it suitable for myriad applications. It has become the world's second most used metal after steel.Annual primary production of aluminium in 2006 was around 34 million tonnes and recycled production around 16 million tonnes. The total of some 50 million tonnes compares with 17 million tonnes of copper, 8 million tonnes of lead and 0.4 million tonnes of tin.