Recycling of metals
13 million tonnes of metal was recycled in 2005.
Recycling metals has saved about £5.6 billion a year.
It is expensive to extract metal from the ground, and is cheaper to recycle.
Sometimes it can be difficult to sort metals for melting, due to alloys, which are a mixture of metals.
Aluminium is an expensive metal, but has a low boiling point meaning it doesn't need much heat to melt it, therefore cheaper.
Recycling metal provides more jobs for workers and brings in more money.
Metals usually make up for 8.4% of the world's waste.
It is not cheaper to recycle copper because it is a mixture of metals, this mean it must be separated before melted.

Resources
The recycling of metals makes people more aware of the lack of resources.
In order to maintain resources for the high demand of metal, metals must be recycled to continue to extract metal at the rate we are doing, they will run out soon.

Energy
Transport- large tucks and lorries are used to collect scrap metal from recycling banks, transport it to the recycling centre and then back to the stores to be resold
Heat- all metals must be melted to reuse.
Recycling steel means that we save 50% of energy, that we would have used to extract steel from its ore.
Recycling aluminium saves 95% energy.
Recycling metals save energy and 92% for aluminium, 90% for copper and 56% for steel.
Recycling aluminium only uses 5% of the energy used to extract aluminium from its ore.
The steel industry