My home is full of ghosts. I grab one parked on my nightstand before I go downstairs to make the coffee: an empty can of lime-flavored seltzer, a bedtime thirst quencher now destined for the recycling bin.
This pop-top metal can, a miracle of design that weighs half as much as a first-class letter, is emblazoned with the label “refreshe,” all in lowercase letters. This is a ghost name for a ghost product. Every grocery, retail chain, and warehouse store has its ghost brands, their own private labels of products they sell but do not make. Washing machines, mouthwash, underwear, batteries, and every flavor of soda known to man—there are ghost versions of them all, their prices lower than the “name brands,” their labels vague or silent on their true origins and journeys. It’s all part of the vast puzzle of the modern consumer economy, in which we eat, guzzle, buy, and use things with no idea who makes them, where they come from, or what great dance of men and materials transports them to us.
But there are clues hidden in plain sight. My soda can is embedded with a coded road map that, properly read, lifts the sheet off the ghost of this ubiquitous, familiar object.
Most consumers don’t notice or look for it, but each of the billions of beverage cans made in America bears a small logo or company name unobtrusively tucked below the bar code or near the bottom rim. It may be an image of a crown or a company name apparently unrelated to the beverage inside: Ball and Rexam are the two most common ones, companies that began the merger process in 2015. These mark the maker of the can, not its contents. On the can’s domed bottom—a shape not at all arbitrary but part of an intelligent design—is the familiar inked product “use by” date and code, the black machine print starkly obvious yet barely legible against the pale silver of the unadorned metal.
An even closer look yields information most never notice: two numbers a half inch tall embossed faintly into the can bottom rather than inked. These numbers, sometimes reversed as if in mirror image, are part of the quality control tracking process used by manufacturers of the cans. They identify the factory line and specific machine that turned a sheet of metal into a can. Before shipping, every can gets a fast but thorough inspection by computerized video in the time it takes a human to blink; the numbers let defects be pinpointed to an errant machine, metal die, alignment, or setting. It’s no accident that every can is the same—these codes and inspections weed out the outliers.
Such clues also uncover the path a beverage takes from creation to expiration, one that explains much about the transportation embedded in all our products, lives, and choices, and how this particular container can be both very green and very dirty at the same time, ingenious yet also mad. The trail of numbers, logos, and names on my particular can of refreshe reveals a tangled path that begins in Australia but also includes most of the countries of Europe and the majority of states in America. Then it crosses oceans, ports, and freight yards to an aluminum mill in Tennessee, after which the material that will become my can of lime-flavored seltzer finally arrives at a rail spur in Northern California behind a beverage can manufacturing plant. From there it will travel by truck to a bottling plant and then a grocery distribution center for shipment to my local supermarket. That entire journey took as little as 60 days and spanned fewer than 10,000 miles for some of the material in that seltzer and its package. Other portions took as many as 60 years and several million miles before reaching my nightstand, an odd quirk of the door-to-door economy and the unique material that goes into that can.
Long or short, such a journey always starts with a reddish clod of rock and dirt called bauxite, inconveniently located in tropical regions of the world far from those who want it most. From that red dirt comes that most versatile of metals, aluminum, and a journey that touches every home and car and truck and plane—and soda can—in America, and the world.
Little cans are big business. America produces 94 billion of the beverage variety in a year, about a fifth of the world total. That’s 2,981 aluminum cans pressed, cut, molded, and stretched into shape every second, which amounts to 293 cans a year of beer, soda, juice, and energy drinks for every man, woman, and child in the country.1
Aluminum is used in tens of thousands of products, from jetliner skins to automotive engine blocks, from glass and ceramics to thousands of miles of high-voltage power lines, from the liners of potato chip bags and juice pouches to the cladding inside nuclear reactors. From exquisite creations such as artificial sapphires to the mundane wrapping that keeps your leftover meat loaf fresh, aluminum has worked its way into daily life and the constant movement of ourselves and our stuff. This upstart metal went from zero to everywhere, from little known to essential in the space of little more than a century, while iron and steel needed a head start that predates Christianity by thousands of years to reach a comparably exalted position in our modern world. And no single product commands as much of the world supply of aluminum as the single-use, disposable beverage can.
One of every five pounds of aluminum processed in the world each year becomes a can for our beer, soda, and other refreshments. The lowly, ingenious can we barely give a single thought is also the single largest piece of a $90 billion global aluminum industry.2 That means my seltzer can and all its little sisters are worth $18 billion a year before a drop of brew or bubbly water even touches it. Just on the basis of labor, energy, and material costs, my can of seltzer is worth far more than the beverage it holds.
On its face, this can may seem little more than a simple, convenient storage device, but storage is not the driver of this familiar object’s design and worth, any more than a giant shipping container is designed for storage. The can’s primary purpose is to enable the transportation of massive amounts of single-serve beverages more efficiently and cheaply than any other container type.3 Its virtues include being lighter and stronger than reusable glass. When boxed, it wastes less space than tapered and necked single-use plastic bottles. And it is far more stackable than either of these rival materials when placed on pallets and loaded on ships and trucks, saving space, trips, fuel, and money. Think of the can as a miniature shipping container itself, designed to be placed easily in much larger containers and sent on its way. The fact that it stacks nicely in a home cupboard, refrigerator, or picnic cooler is merely a happy by-product of its shippability.
The aluminum beverage container, then, is as much a transportation game changer as those giant shipping containers that longshoremen also call cans, although the beverage variety is prized for more than its shippable design and weight. Beverage cans are prized most of all for the unique quality of the metal used to make them: its immortality. Alone among all manufactured substances, aluminum is infinitely recyclable. And, just as rare, it is highly profitable to do so.
This is how aluminum merchants can position their metal as the new transportation “killer app”: a superlight, superstrong substance that never wears out at the molecular level but can be re-formed at will and sourced domestically over and over, thereby cutting production and transportation costs by a factor of ten. New supplies of the metal—what industry insiders call “primary” aluminum—are dirty and energy-intensive to obtain, after which the substance must be transported across vast distances to reach the majority of consumers. But once shipped, “secondary” aluminum can be continually reincarnated as a new product with many of the costs and distances stripped away. More than a century of mining has produced nearly a billion tons of the stuff, and an estimated three quarters of that remains in circulation and theoretically available for recycling from old cars, aircraft, appliances, obsolete TV antennas, and, of course, cans, which are recycled at far higher rates than any other single-use container.4
No wonder the beverage can has become the global poster child for recycling, the one “single-use” product that gets recycled more than it’s landfilled.5 The other big recyclables—paper and plastic—degrade during the recycling process, or lose value, or end up costing more than new material, so market forces for repurposing these waste products are mixed at best. Recycled aluminum, however, is a different story: not only is it chemically and physically indistinguishable from the new stuff, but it is beyond cost competitive. Aluminum recycling uses 92 percent less energy than mining and refining aluminum from bauxite,6 and is often done near the end consumer rather than in far-off pit mines, lowering transportation costs and distance. Recycled aluminum is so valuable that its salvage earnings often underwrite municipal programs that recycle other more marginal plastic, glass, and paper waste.7
This explains why so much of the aluminum extracted from the earth since the 1880s is still in play, some of it recycled dozens or even hundreds of times. Some fraction of the aluminum in your car, your fridge, or your can of cola could have been mined more than a century ago. In previous incarnations it might have flown bombing raids in World War II, or made ice cubes in some 1960s refrigerator, or emerged from the thousands of tons of aluminum skyscraper sheathing salvaged from the destruction of the World Trade Center after 9/11. Or the can in your hand may have been someone else’s can of soda as little as two months ago, because that’s the current turnaround from fridge to recycling bin to factory to store shelf.
Kevin McKnight looks at such a can—or a new, lightweight wheel hub, or an experimental aluminum-based car battery that theoretically could boost an electric car to a 1,000-mile range—and sees the future. An aluminum-coated future, to be sure, which is to be expected, as McKnight works for the world’s first and largest aluminum company, Alcoa. “We’ve reached an inflection point,” the dapper Pittsburgh-based executive declared at an annual conference of environmentally conscious corporate leaders called Brainstorm Green. “The economics of aluminum are transforming whole industries, and transportation is our sweet spot.”
McKnight’s official title at Alcoa is chief sustainability officer, which puts him in charge of the company’s efforts to become cleaner and greener—and, in the process, grow that transportation sweet spot into a mobility revolution. In practice his job might better be described as chief evangelist for an aluminum-rich future, and he is wildly enthusiastic about the possibilities as he travels the company’s supply chain from Australia to Jamaica to Brazil and Canada, where he talks up the benefits of the industry his company invented at gatherings like Brainstorm.
Long the material of choice for aircraft and space vehicles because of its light weight and the fact that it does not rust like iron and steel, aluminum is now being touted as the next big thing for reinventing ground transportation. Aluminum is so light (atom by atom it weighs less than many gases) that swapping it with steel in cars and trucks could cut the average vehicle’s weight in half, with corresponding decreases in fuel consumption and carbon emissions. In truth, such gains have been achievable since World War II. But McKnight’s new pitch to carmakers—who have invested billions in steel bending and welding machines that they have been loath to replace—suddenly sounds much more enticing these days. The looming U.S. legal mandate that new cars more than double their average fuel efficiency by 2025 has seen to that.8
Turning cars into giant aluminum cans could go a long way to satisfying that goal, and McKnight and Alcoa, along with their competitors, have been pushing out new products to facilitate this “light-weighting” of vehicles to make them greener without necessarily abandoning the internal combustion engines that American carmakers (and American consumers) know and love best. Ford has now converted the body of its F–150 pickup truck—for three decades the most popular vehicle in America—from steel to an Alcoa-made military-grade aluminum alloy. This is just the visible thin skin of the truck body as opposed to the load-bearing structures beneath, but the partial changeover from steel still cut the truck’s weight by 700 pounds. Given the 700,000 annual sales of the F–150, that’s like taking 120,000 of the trucks off the road.
Vehicles are the single most recycled consumer product in the world,9 so the increasing amounts of aluminum going into cars and trucks will eventually be recycled, providing the same 92 percent energy cost savings that beverage cans offer. But it takes nearly twelve years on average for passenger vehicles to enter the big recycling bin known as the scrapyard (and two or three times that for planes, trains, and cargo ships), with about 11.5 million vehicles scrapped annually in the U.S. Therein lies one of the great contradictions in the aluminum story and McKnight’s sweet-spot pitch. Demand for aluminum in the transportation space has exploded—the record 504 million pounds of the metal delivered to automakers in 2014 is projected to rise to 2.68 billion pounds by 201810—but recycling alone cannot yield the required supplies quickly enough. So ever more primary aluminum has to be mined and refined to meet the demand for more efficient cars.
This is how aluminum can be at once green and dirty, both a shining example of the “cradle-to-cradle” reuse economy and a coal-soaked, industrial-age relic of primitive extraction, spewing waste and toxins in its wake. This is where my can of seltzer’s journey begins, straddling two worlds.
The world’s largest bauxite mine is operated by Alcoa at Huntly in Western Australia, producing more than 20 million tons of the reddish brown ore each year. Towering excavators and loaders with wheels twice the height of their drivers, capable of hauling 190 tons of ore in a single load, crawl out of the pit in a constant stream. These dump trucks on steroids deliver the bauxite to the grinding roar of the rock crushers, which must be sprayed constantly with water to suppress the choking clouds of red dust spewing from their jaws. Boulders of ore torn fresh from the ground are pummeled into three-inch pebbles, each of which has 20 to 30 percent aluminum chemically locked within. The pebbles are loaded onto massive conveyor belts that snake down through forestland more than fourteen miles, delivering 5,400 tons every hour to Alcoa’s sprawling Pinjarra refinery.
There the ore is put through a complex four-step chemical and cooking process, the main feature of which involves dissolving the material with copious amounts of caustic soda. This allows the ore to be separated into two streams, one rich in a precursor compound, aluminum hydroxide, the other, larger stream consisting of a noxious sludge called “red mud,” which is shunted off to giant holding ponds. Red mud is the toxic albatross around the aluminum industry’s collective neck, as there is no use or safe disposal method for the stuff.11
Heated to 1,100 degrees and treated with other chemicals in the next stage of manufacturing, the aluminum hydroxide sheds its hydrogen atoms and is converted to aluminum oxide crystals. When washed and dried, the material looks like granulated sugar but is hard enough to scratch glass. Commonly called alumina, these crystals are a little over half aluminum by weight and make for a convenient form for shipping in bulk. Together, alumina and bauxite are one of the most shipped substances on earth, one of what the shipping industry calls the “five major bulks.” (The other four are iron ore, coal, grain, and phosphate rock, most of which is used to make fertilizer, a major U.S. export.)12
This method for refining bauxite was invented by the Austrian chemist Carl Josef Bayer (no relation to the aspirin inventor) in the late 1880s. It proved to be one of two critical discoveries needed to commercialize aluminum production. The Bayer process is still the only practical method for making alumina to this day.
From the refinery, alumina is shipped around the world, with about 10 percent of global supplies diverted for making such products as ceramic insulators, spark plugs, and other dense ceramics, as well as synthetic rubies for lasers and sapphire glass for watch faces (and, possibly, future smartphones). Alumina is also an ingredient in sunscreens and facial cosmetics. The stuff truly gets around.
Most alumina, however, goes to smelters—some near the refineries, some in the U.S. and across the globe—to be converted from sugary crystals into pure metallic aluminum. This is where the second critical process from the 1880s comes in, essentially unchanged for 130 years.
At the smelter, the alumina is dissolved in a molten mineral called cryolite, which possesses two amazing qualities: it puts the yellow in yellow fireworks, and it cuts the melting point of aluminum to less than half its normal 2,200 degrees, which means it also cuts energy consumption and cost. A synthetic version of cryolite is used these days, as natural supplies previously mined in Greenland have dwindled, and not from an excess of yellow fireworks. The molten mixture of alumina and fake cryolite is then placed in something like a giant battery cell, where it is jolted with fantastic amounts of electrical current via the process of electrolysis. The principles at work should be recognizable to every denizen of a high school chemistry lab who ever used a mild-mannered tabletop version of the process to break down a beaker of water into hydrogen and oxygen with a dry-cell battery and a pair of electrodes. In the same way, the cryolite-alumina mixture, liquefied at 980 degrees, is broken down by industrial-scale electrolysis, which unlocks alumina’s chemical bonds joining oxygen to aluminum. The elemental aluminum that can’t exist in nature on its own then sinks to the bottom of the molten mixture, a pure metal at last. Then the still liquid aluminum can be drained off, poured into long cylindrical molds, and cooled into ingots. The ingots used to make beverage cans run up to 24 feet long and weigh up to 46,000 pounds each. Each ingot can make 1.5 million 12-ounce cans.
Two different chemists working independently developed the process simultaneously: Charles Martin Hall in Ohio, and Paul Héroult in France. By the time the patents and lawsuits were settled and the smelting method became known as the Hall-Héroult Process,13 Hall had founded a manufacturer he dubbed the Pittsburgh Reduction Company, invented the commercial aluminum industry, and become a billionaire. Later he renamed his outfit the Aluminum Company of America, which is now known as Alcoa.
These two processes from the 1880s are still used to make virtually all the aluminum in the world. Aluminum had only been observed in its pure metallic form a few decades before Bayer, Hall, and Héroult made their discoveries; until they came along, chemists were able to tease out only small amounts of this mysterious metal through laborious and expensive methods. Napoleon III, frustrated when he could not commission enough of the metal for a new generation of lightweight battle armor, settled for some very special aluminum dinner plates he reserved for his most esteemed guests; lesser visitors had to endure eating from far more ordinary (and less expensive) gold and silver. Before the French emperor’s time, no one realized that aluminum was a metal at all, nor that it was the third most plentiful element on earth,14 although various medical and textile uses for aluminum-rich compounds have been around since antiquity.15
In 2014, worldwide production of primary aluminum topped 53 million metric tons. Smelting that metal required nearly 690.170 gigawatts of electricity16—more than twice the power consumption of America’s largest and most power-hungry state, California. Aluminum smelting uses more electricity than almost any other industrial process; engineers joke that the metal ought to be defined as “congealed electricity.” Alcoa has located most of its smelting operations near sources of hydropower to lower the cost and environmental impact, but globally—particularly in China, with more than half the world’s production—more aluminum is made with dirty coal-powered electricity than anything else. Domestic aluminum smelting in the U.S. alone consumes 5 percent of the electricity generated nationwide.
What this means is that aluminum’s weight advantage over iron comes at a price: iron can be produced from iron oxide in a simple, relatively compact blast furnace; the complex Hall-Héroult process requires literally acres of electrolysis cells and city-scale power plants to produce equivalent amounts of aluminum. The bottom line: a car part made from steel costs 37 percent less than the same part made of aluminum,17 although a life-cycle analysis by the Oak Ridge National Laboratory found that the overall energy and carbon footprint of a mostly aluminum car is less than a standard steel vehicle because of lower operating and fuel costs.18 The calculation changes radically in aluminum’s favor when recycled metal is used.
Once cooled, the aluminum ingots from which my seltzer can would be made were shipped out of Australia by cargo vessel to the Port of Long Beach, then taken by rail to Alcoa’s Great Smoky Mountains fabrication plant in Tennessee. Ingots made from recycled cans are brought to the same plant. The metal used for cans is not pure aluminum but has small portions of magnesium and manganese (about 1 percent of each) mixed in for strength and stiffness, with the tops given an extra portion of magnesium and less manganese so it can withstand the stress of the pop-top. American beverage cans on average are 70 percent recycled metal, 30 percent primary aluminum.19
The Tennessee plant’s main product is a five-mile-long coil of sheet aluminum used exclusively for beverage cans. Each 21-inch-thick metal bar is first heated and rolled into 3,000-foot-long coils an eighth of an inch thick, then cold-milled with massive rollers that bring the aluminum down to a thickness of a few thousandths of an inch. The Tennessee plant churns out enough of this thin aluminum sheet every minute to make 150,000 cans.20
The 7-foot-wide, 25,000-pound rolls of aluminum next travel by rail to an industrial park in Fairfield, California, to the Ball Metal Beverage Container Corporation plant. Headquartered in Colorado, Ball is one of those immense companies little known to consumers whose products are in so many homes; a $9 billion business with manufacturing plants worldwide, twenty-eight of them in the U.S. That makes Ball the largest beverage can maker in the world, churning out 50 billion cans a year for big soda and beer brands, as well as ghost-brand cans like those that contain refreshe.
The five-mile sheets of aluminum are uncoiled and fed into a cupping press, where rapid-fire blades strike home in a rhythmic, thudding rumble that fills the plant with a sound like a thousand marchers. The press cuts the metal sheets like a batch of silvery cookies, spewing out disks of aluminum several times wider than a finished can. These disks are then “drawn” through a die, meaning they are pushed through a metal doughnut by a cylindrical punch that forms each disk into a shallow cup about 3.5 inches in diameter. At this stage my can looks like a metal petri dish.
A conveyor belt moves this new army of cups to the next machine, the body maker. Each cup is pushed through a smaller die that squeezes it into the proper width of a twelve-ounce soda can, about 2.5 inches. The die forces the flexible aluminum to grow even thinner, the metal redistributed upward from thickness to tallness. At this stage, the can is not yet half its finished height, but it’s getting there. This stage is called “redrawing.”
The next stage pushes each cup through a series of increasingly narrow dies that stretch the cup gradually to its proper height while making the walls thinner—like stretching a rubber band, except the metal doesn’t snap back. This is called “ironing.”
At the end of the ironing, a dome-shaped die is pressed into the bottom of each can. Whether used in buildings or cans, an arch or dome is stronger and can withstand more pressure than a flat surface. Doming allows the can bottom to be thinner, saving material, weight, and money. Each of the dozens of doming tools on the assembly lines has a unique two-digit number, and those numbers are embossed on the can bottom when the dome shape is pressed into place.
All this happens fast: the redrawing, ironing, and doming of a can takes about one-seventh of a second.
Next the can’s open top end is trimmed for a clean edge and uniform height, followed by multiple high-temperature washes, drying, and the painting of labels. The can is baked to harden this “decoration,” as the labels are called, followed by a spray of waterproof varnish inside the can to keep beverages from tasting of aluminum and to protect the can from reacting with acids in a beverage.
The narrow neck of the can is then formed by passing it through a series of eleven “necking sleeves,” then the top is folded over into a flange; the can top can be attached later. The neck (early aluminum cans had little or no necking) is not for aesthetics: it reduces the amount of aluminum needed for each can slightly, reducing its weight as well as cost. While inconsequential for one can, the effect across 100 billion cans is massive: the current amount of necking saves about 100,000 tons of aluminum a year. That’s enough to make a solid cube of aluminum 105 feet tall—higher than a ten-story building.
Computerized video cameras scan each can for leaks and imperfections, then the finished cans, their mouths gaping open, are packed on pallets and wrapped in plastic film to hold them in place for shipment to the beverage plant.
A separate machine stamps out the can lids with integrated pop-tops at a rate of 6,000 a minute. The pull key that opens the can looks like it’s riveted in place, but there is no separate rivet; that would break the seal of the can and allow leaks. Instead, the shape of a rivet is drawn out of the aluminum lid material itself, providing a seamless flange that holds the separately made pull key in place with a fold of metal.
The cans and lids are then shipped to the Safeway supermarket chain’s bottling plant thirty-two miles away in the San Francisco Bay Area city of Richmond, California. On the refreshe line, ordinary water is mixed with natural lime concentrate and injected with carbon dioxide to give the seltzer its fizz. As soon as the cans are filled, the bottling machinery attaches the lids by folding the metal twice into a double airtight seam without welding or solder—just a little liquid gel inside the folds that hardens into a gasket to prevent even microscopic leaks.
The carbonation inside the can causes twice normal atmospheric pressures. This is why aluminum cans can be so thin: the pressure inside is always pushing out against the walls of the can, making the structure stronger and very difficult to squeeze or damage. This is why crushing a sealed can of soda in your hand is impossible, and why crushing an open can is child’s play. This is also why even non-carbonated teas, coffees, juices, and other canned beverages hiss when opened. They are pressurized as well as the top is slammed into place, although inert nitrogen, not carbon dioxide, is used for these drinks. Nitrogen does not make drinks fizzy.
My seltzer left the bottling plant in a twelve-pack carton, entered the Safeway distribution system, and found its way by semitruck to my local market, a subsidiary of the Safeway company called Pavilions. The pack would go on sale for the ridiculously low price of $2.49, the true magic of the ghost brand being its low cost. The next time I would purchase some, the can would show me a different road map, having been fabricated by Ball’s arch can-making rival in the fiercely competitive aluminum business, Rexam,21 at a plant in in the Los Angeles area, then bottled at Safeway’s Norwalk plant, a town just ten minutes from my home.
When enough cans have accumulated in my garage—okay, when too many cans have accumulated in my garage so we can’t procrastinate anymore—we bring them to the recycling outpost in back of that same supermarket where I purchased them. Because of California’s robust container deposit law, we receive a dime refund for every can we turn in, one reason why the state is the national recycling leader. Only ten states impose container deposits on beverages, however, and this explains why, nationwide, America’s recycling rate compares unfavorably with Europe’s and Japan’s. It’s also why, despite the value of scrap aluminum, 43 percent of aluminum cans used by consumers still end up thrown away instead of recycled.22
As a consequence, the only way can makers can achieve the 70 percent recycled content in U.S. soda cans is by importing old cans from elsewhere in the world, mostly Europe. And so the metal in my can of lime seltzer—and every other canned beverage in America—is far better traveled than most of the consumers who buy it, as the industry is forced to outsource the metal from old cans from around the globe to satisfy our thirst. The cost of hauling scrap aluminum cans around the planet might knock some of the shine off the industry’s green credentials, but it still pencils out: even old cans transported from abroad are cheaper and have a lower energy and carbon footprint than pulling that same metal out of the mines.
The technology, ingenuity, and massive amounts of transportation embedded in my simple canned carbonated beverage is in many ways a perfect case study, a microcosm for our entire way of life, commerce, and movement. No one company nor any one country could make the whole widget, from Australian ore to lime flavor. It’s real lime, not artificial, the label on my can of refreshe says, so someone had to grow the limes; fertilize, water, and pick them; then squeeze, package, and ship the juice. Someone else had to make the paint and varnish for decorating the cans, and package those products and transport them. Someone else had to make that carton for the cans and the wooden pallets they are shipped on, and the plastic shrink wrap that keeps the featherweight containers stacked instead of flying around inside the truck. It is a true global product, this ghost-brand soda, one that could only be made in this way in today’s door-to-door world.
For all its wonder and power, though, a trap lies hidden within this door-to-door prowess. This seamless behind-the-scenes delivery machine can magic a red rock in Australia into a seltzer can in my refrigerator with utter consistency and reliability, and if that’s not remarkable enough, sixty days after I drain it and toss it away, it can be back in my refrigerator again, good as new. This is an extraordinary product resurrection. Yet habit, time, and ubiquity have drained this achievement of its true wonder and rendered it not just ordinary but beneath our notice. It’s simply a thing we buy and use and expect, which is the unintended but inevitable accomplishment of our modern, have-it-now logistics age: turning the remarkable into the mundane. And that’s the trap: Who questions what’s beneath notice? Who asks why—if—we need such products, or even if they make sense?
Instead of questioning the very nature of the can—or the ship or the car or any other staple of the door-to-door world that has become part of daily American culture—the focus is almost always on refining the magic. Make cargo ships twice as big in the space of ten years so they can carry even more stuff door to door—but give no thought to the impact on roads, traffic, and infrastructure when all this extra cargo slams into land. Or make cars lighter with aluminum so they burn less gas and emit less carbon. But don’t question the transportation fundamentals these lighter cars will perpetuate—a country where 57 percent of households own two or more cars,23 all of them spending an average of twenty-two hours a day parked and disused.
And then there’s the can. In 1972, the most brilliant manufacturers on the planet managed to squeeze twenty-two cans out of a pound of aluminum. Now the industry standard is thirty-four. Researchers are currently working on eking out a few more. Perhaps they’ll reach forty cans a pound someday. Think of the aluminum, the energy, the resources, that could be saved, the industry spokesmen say, and they are absolutely correct. But at the end of the day, it’s still a can that we use once and throw away, sometimes into a recycling bin. It can’t even be resealed once opened. How many quarter-full cans of flat soda or beer are spilled down the drain, wasted because that is the intention behind the design? No one knows for sure, but even with a conservative estimate of 5 percent of canned beverages wasted, that would amount to 9 million gallons a year—all that weight and energy moved across cities and continents just to be thrown out. Is this really the most efficient and sensible solution that our geniuses of movement and design can come up with? You could ask the same sort of question of cargo ships or cars, of course, but just imagining American households without car ownership or American ports without massive imports is a tough sell in a landscape and economy designed around them.
But the can shows the way. History, rather than imagination, reveals an alternative reality. Soda water, seltzer water, club soda—whatever the chosen name—carbonated water has been around since the eighteenth century, long before the aluminum can came along, or industrial bottling, for that matter. A soda siphon, seltzer bottle, or other reusable device for carbonating water—early versions used bicarbonate of soda as the carbon dioxide source, later versions featured injections from small canisters of the gas under pressure—was a common household implement from the late 1800s through the 1930s. People would drink it straight as a health tonic or mix it with other flavors, usually alcoholic ones. And when Coca-Cola became the first commercially popular soda pop in the U.S., it was purchased as a concentrated syrup. Consumers could make their own Coke at home or, more commonly, go to a drugstore soda fountain to be served a hand-mixed treat, ice cream optional. The notable feature of either alternative was a lack of single-use containers. Consumers could make their own plain soda and add the flavor sold by Coke, its competitors, or additives of their own devising. One purchase of syrup in one container made many servings, a system that was efficient, low-waste, and needed minimal logistics to close the deal. The heaviest and least expensive ingredient in a single serving of soda—the water—was provided by the consumer, so it didn’t have to be bottled, canned, or shipped. If there must be mass consumption of a nutritionally deficient, obesity-causing sweet, fizzy beverage, there is no more efficient or low-cost method for distributing it than this original model.
But it is not the most profitable model. Taking its cue from the beer industry, which crafts a product not so easily made at home and therefore in need of a bottle or can, the soda industry marketed a new innovation: single-serve, ready-to-drink glass bottles, which led eventually to plastic bottles and aluminum cans. Shipping all the extra water and weight was a challenge but well worth it from the industry’s point of view: there was so much money to be made selling many single-serve containers to a customer instead of one container of concentrated syrup. You bought a soda siphon only once and a supply of syrup only infrequently. But single-serve containers have to be bought over and over, and from the industry’s point of view 95 percent of the drink being sold is simply water (99 percent for diet sodas). The most costly parts end up being the container and the transportation.
From an efficiency, shipping, and waste point of view, this shift made no sense. Consumers were paying more to get less. But it was marketed as an innovation, as progress, as convenience. And that fussy old siphon belonged to an older generation. Drugstore soda fountains, which had gained in popularity when Prohibition shut down the bars, became passé. The market—and the marketing—spoke. Now, a century later, there is a slowly growing niche for home soda makers offering a back-to-the-future appeal and a more sustainable model, but America for the most part wants its soft drinks in disposable, single-serve containers. The can business is booming. But the history of the can reveals this to have been a choice, not an inevitability—one that has been profitable for a few enterprises, but costly for consumers as well as for the planet.
When considering our most popular, enduring, and costly container, the car, and how inevitable its current form has seemed since World War II, it may be useful to think of it, too, as a great big can: a choice, not an inevitability, for the future of the door-to-door world.