RECYCLING JUST MAKES SENSE

The benefits of recycling make good sense. The benefits of recycling responsibly make even better sense - for us, our suppliers, our consumers, and our communities. Alter Metal Recycling has - for well over a century - maintained a commitment to quality, integrity, and responsibility, with a vision to lead the industry in these commitments. In lockstep with this goal is a commitment at all levels of our company to protecting the environment. We understand that managing our operations' environmental aspects is essential for continued success, especially as our company experiences rapid growth and enters new markets and communities.

	The recycling rate for steel in the United States increased to 63 percent in 2005, the highest rate ever recorded and making steel the world's most recycled packing material. Steel is North America's Number #1 Recycled Material. Each year, more steel is recycled than aluminum, paper, glass and plastic combined. Americans throw away enough aluminum to rebuild our entire commercial fleet of airplanes every 3 months. Recycling creates 6 times as many jobs as landfilling. Recycling just one aluminum can saves enough energy to operate a TV for 3 hours or a 100 watt light bulb for 5 hours. The energy saved each year by recycling steel is equal to the electrical power used by 18 million homes each year - or enough to sustain the residents of Los Angeles for eight years. Every ton of steel recycled conserves 2,500 pounds of iron ore,1,400 pounds of coal and 120 pounds of limestone. Production of one ton of new aluminum ingot requires 4-5 tons of bauxite ore. The energy needed to replace all the aluminum cans wasted each year is equivalent to 16 million barrels of oil--enough to keep a million cars on the road for a year. There are over 13,000 aluminum cans recycled in California every minute. In the past 50 years, approximately half of the steel produced in this country has been recycled through the steelmaking process. Nearly 1.4 million tons of steel cans were recycled back into various steel products in 2005. There are over 2.5 billion cans recycled in the UK each year. Placed end to-end, these recycled cans would stretch three quarters of the way round the Earth. It requires only 5% of the energy to make a can out of recycled aluminum that it does with virgin ore. Every day, Americans use enough steel and tin cans to make a steel pipe running from Los Angeles to New York and back. For every six aluminum cans we don't recycle, we waste the equivalent of one aluminum can full of gasoline. It takes the same amount of energy to make 20 cans with recycled aluminum as it does to make one new from scratch. Alter Metal Recycling reprocessed over 110 million pounds of nonferrous scrap metal including aluminum cans last year.