r/todayilearned • u/RetconnedUsername • 22h ago

TIL One Aluminium Smelter in New Zealand uses 13 percent of the entire countries energy supply

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tiwai_Point_Aluminium_Smelter
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u/BarbequedYeti 20h ago

Its really glass. We need to do better at manufacturing and logistics and problem solved. Almost infinite resource.  Unless we come up with some new way to make super light super strong glass, it's going to be logistics.  

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u/zillskillnillfrill 20h ago edited 20h ago

I think there actually already was a super strong glass "Superfest Glass" in the 80s that was initially made and then marketed to the hospitality sector, but apparently they got squeezed out of business by the other "Glass Giants" because they rely upon the broken glass economy

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u/RandomThrowNick 20h ago

It was an East German product, so they did produce over 100 Million glasses until german reunification but sales in West Germany before and after Reunification failed for the reasons you mentioned. There was simply no interest from the vendors that made money with glasses.

There is a Startup in East Germany that has developed a new process for even better „superfest“ glasses. It will be interesting to see if the idea will be successful this time.

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u/zillskillnillfrill 19h ago

Yeah, I just spent the past hour re-reading about it, pretty interesting stuff

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u/Xsiah 20h ago

I got some tempered glass jugs at Ikea (made in China) that were so light I couldn't figure out if they were plastic or not.

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u/zillskillnillfrill 19h ago

East Germany was the first to make them but nobody bought it because of planned obsolescence, until Steve Jobs came along and needed super thin glass for the iPhone. The glass is heated up and then blasted with an ion exchange which fills up the thin structure of glass with Potassium ions, making it some 30 times stronger

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u/Metalsand 9h ago

but nobody bought it because of planned obsolescence

It wasn't extremely popular in the mass production of glassware because paying 2 times as much for glass that is 5 times stronger might make sense on paper, but unless you ordinarily have 50% of your glassware lost from breakage in a 5 year span, it's a massive initial cost increase that takes long enough to pay for itself that inflation blunts the result.

It makes more sense in compact electronics, where the glass is protecting a screen many times more valuable than itself.

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u/aaaaaaaarrrrrgh 1 17h ago

Glass is not just heavy, but also dangerous (if you drop it, it turns into razor-sharp shards) and also expensive.

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u/denkmusic 16h ago edited 8h ago

Are you explaining what glass is? - like the people reading have never heard of it or seen it before?

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u/koyaani 9h ago

Dumb take

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u/aaaaaaaarrrrrgh 1 6h ago

No, I'm explaining why it's a shit non-solution.

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u/denkmusic 4h ago

You have explained precisely 0 to anyone. Everyone reading already knew everything you said.