Best of Earth911 Podcast: Crown Holding’s Jennifer Bogs on Making Aluminum More Sustainable

How can we make one of the most recycled materials more sustainable? Meet Jennifer Bogs, director of global sustainability at Crown Holdings, Inc., one of the largest aluminum can manufacturers worldwide at $12.9 billion in annual sales. The aluminum industry famously claims that 75% of all aluminum ever produced is still in use today; it’s a highly recyclable material. Reusing 1 ton of aluminum reduces by 8 tons the need to mine raw bauxite, the ore aluminum is made of, and saves 14,000 kWh of energy, enough electricity to power one U.S. home for an entire year. But the Environmental Protection Agency’s last aluminum recycling statistics, from 2018, show that only 50.4% of drink cans distributed in the U.S. were recycled. And across all uses of aluminum, only 34.9% of the material is recycled. Recycling results in the United States do not compare favorably with Europe, where…