alt Hacker NewsI hate to agree but you're basically right. If we switched everything disposable (glass, plastic, paper) into an aluminum version of itself, the world would be a much better place. Aluminum pizza boxes and Amazon shipments would be weird, and would probably need rounded corners (hello iPhone designers going into box design at retirement) but they would be 100.000% recyclable.
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Would they? Aluminum needs a lot of energy to melt and then reform into something new. Since the alloy is not known they need to refine the different metals out just to ensure that they get the correct alloy for the user. Mining Al uses a lot more energy.
That is I suspect the total damage from new plastic is less than recycled Al. Someone needs to find numbers to verify this of course.
Aluminium is a really bad container for aciduous food stuff. You need a good plastic liner in the cans to handle it. So it is absolutely not a perfect container.
The problem is the packaging not the recycling.
If we had arbitrary energy to spend it would be great, but it takes a massive amount of money to purify from ore, and a still significant amount to scrap into new material, especially with high surface area aluminum like cans and boxes. Iron is the easiest energy win, but you also have to deal with corrosion and rust.