Life Cycle of an English Pop Can

1. Bauxite is mined in Australia and trucked to a chemical reduction mill where a half-hour process purifies each ton of bauxite ore into one-half ton of aluminum oxide.
2. The aluminum oxide is loaded onto a giant ore carrier and sent to Sweden or Norway, where hydroelectric dams provide cheap electricity. After this month-long journey across two oceans, it sits at a smelter for up to two months awaiting further processing.
3. The smelting process takes two hours to turn the half-ton into a quarter-ton of aluminum, which are cured for two weeks.
4. The aluminum ingots are then shipped to roller mills in Germany or Sweden, where they are heated to 900 degreed Fahrenheit and rolled to a thickness of one-eighth inch.
5. The aluminum is then rolled into ten-ton coils and transported to a warehouse, then cold-rolled to a thickness one-tenth of their former thickness--perhaps in this same country, or perhaps transported again to a different country.
6. These rolls are then shipped to England, where the sheets are punched and formed into cans, and then washed, dried, painted (twice), lacquered, and flanged (for ease of attaching the top later), sprayed inside with anti-corrosives, and finally inspected.
7. The cans are then palletized ,fork-lifted, and warehoused until ready for another shipment.
8. The cans are shipped to the bottling company, where they are again washed, and then filled with water and flavored syrup, caffeine, phosphorus, and CO2 gas.
9. The sugar added to the water (in the preceding step) was likely harvested from beet fields in France, after which it is trucked, milled, refined, and finally shipped to England.
10. The phosphorus comes from Idaho, where it is taken from deep open-pit mines, which also unearths cadmium and radioactive thorium. This process, a round-the-clock operation, requires as much electrical energy as a city of 100,000 people.
11. The pop cans are filled at a rate of 1,500 per minute, sealed with a pop-top, and put into cardboard cartons--made from forest pulp that originated from Sweden or Siberia to the old-growth, virgin forests of British Columbia, the home of eagles and wolverines and otters and grizzlies.
12. Palletized again, they are shipped to a regional warehouse, and finally shipped to the grocery stores, where they will likely be sold within three days.
13. The consumer takes a few minutes to consume the liquid, and then disposes of the remaining container in a brief moment. Note that in England, 84% of these cans are not recycled! The US doesn't do much better, getting 60% of its aluminum from virgin ore--at 20 times as much energy as recycled aluminum!! The US throws away enough aluminum every three months to replace its entire commercial airline fleet.

Isn't this appalling?