how do you help conserve natural resources and energy when you recycle metals

Question

osprey · Answer

if you take several million/billion tonnes of aluminium, iron etc out of the ground via mining, and make tinned foodstuffs out of them, it MAY make some sense to get the empty tins back, melt them down and ... use them again ??? since they've already been processed into tins or whatever, then you don't have to re mine them, so you save that energy. You don't have to "re refine" them maybe as well. And with a bit of "cost-energy budgeting" it may be able to make it cheaper to use the recycled stuff than to pile into the nearest mine and start hacking away at the already bruised earth's supply. http://perendis.webs.com