January 2000

Pop...Fizz...Gulp...

by Ana Arias Terry

Thanks to authors John Ryan and Thein Durning, authors of Stuff: The Secret Lives of Everyday Things, I will never look at a can of soda the same way again. Here are but a few of the highlights of the types of processes, resources used, and environmental impacts caused in making that can of pop most of us take for granted. The authors look at what it takes to bring a can of pop consumed by a typical Pacific Northwest resident to her lips. Ready for some eye poppers? Here we go:

• Pop is 90 percent H20. The average American consumer sucks down more carbonated water in the fizzy stuff than they drink from the old tap. Daily worldwide consumption of soda pop stands at seventy million gallons.

• Top ingredient includes corn syrup, which hails from Iowa. Other goodies needed include a milling plant, water, grinders, acids, enzymes, and heat. Eventually the brew includes preservatives, artificial coloring, flavors, and caffeine.

• The average can weighs half an ounce and is made of aluminum (5 percent from melted recycled cans and scraps). They start out partially as bauxite ore that comes from Australia. Huge contraptions with tires fifteen feet high and mega shovels scoop up some underground rock in strip-mining it. Ore is the goal. Mining for this bauxite metals kills more "surface area" than any other mining type. The stuff is eventually crunched up, washed, dried, and churned up with "caustic soda" from California. The byproduct of this process is a nasty soup of oxidized chemicals that can burn skin. It’s dumped into a pond and often leaches into the ground.

• Smelting happens, using 100,000 amps of electricity. Along the way, perfluorocarbons (PFCs) are released. The energy used during this process is equivalent to a quarter can of gasoline per pop can.

• Huge slabs of aluminum get trucked to the Seattle vicinity. A local mill presses these slabs into rolled aluminum sheets which are taken to another plant that shapes them into cans. Other machines stretch out the can to its final state. The can’s edge gets trimmed, the design gets printed, and a varnish is used as protection. Cans are baked to dry the paint, and a synthetic coating is sprayed inside them. A second baking is done to "cure" the coating.

• At the bottling plant machines fill the cans with soda that’s just about freezing, then close off the tops of the cans.

• Of 100 billion drink cans used annually in the U.S. 40 billion end up in landfills, 60 billion are recycled.

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