Trek to any popular destination this summer, from cities to national parks, and join the crowds. There are always places to go off the beaten path, yet wherever a traveler ends up the question is how to get there. When talking hundreds or thousands of miles, the most common options are: road, rail or air.
When traveling in the West my family has opted for road trips. The Alliance Municipal Airport is convenient to reach about any destination via the Denver International Airport. Passenger trains have not served Alliance since before I was born, however there is a strong BNSF Railway connection with the airline industry. Over the last decade or so, westbound trains have regularly featured Boeing 737 fuselages and other aircraft parts. Having seen these unfinished planes traveling by and flying in the completed versions a number of times, I wonder how much aluminum is required to produce a 737 fuselage.
At the Keep Alliance Beautiful Recycling Center, we baled 2,856 pounds of aluminum during the first quarter of 2021. We will recycle 11,424 pounds of cans and bottles, extrapolating that rate for the rest of the year. How many years to equal one of those plane bodies rolling by, let’s say for a 737-700 series?
Find out how much the aluminum in a 737-700 weighs and divide, right? No problem. I called the company that manufactures the fuselages for Boeing — Spirit AeroSystems, Inc. in Wichita, Kan. A voicemail left for their public relations representative was not returned. The media contact on the company’s automated directory was my next stop. At that number I was told that Fred was not available. When asked, the woman on the line replied, “I can’t help you with that,” then hung up.
Though I prefer to interview actual people, what I found comes solely from search engines. Wikipedia states that the operating empty weight (OEW) of a 737-700 fuselage is 83,000 pounds. And, the sites I visited agree that the 12-foot-4-inch wide cylindrical structure is 80 percent aluminum though none specify by either weight or volume. Of course, several alloys come into play, each with a slightly different weight by size. Even an ordinary pop can incorporates two alloys — 3004 for the shell and 5182 for the lid, according to aluminum.org.
So, this is not exact, but here is my estimate. At 80 percent of the 737-700 fuselage that would be about 66,400 pounds of aluminum. If KAB recyclers bring the same number of pop, beer and other aluminum containers as the first three months the rest of 2021 it would take 5.81 years to equal the cigar-shaped center of a 737.
Maybe we can save our bales and sell them directly to Spirit AeroSystems in 2027? Not likely. The aerospace industry has no tolerance for potential imperfections and impurities, so (from what I read) only buys alloys made from virgin material, not old Pepsi cans. There is a push, however, to recycle more aluminum and other usable components from retired aircraft.
That 12-ounce soft drink can in the fridge today could have held a different beverage in a past life and will probably again if dropped off at the recycling center. The metal can be recycled endlessly, so perhaps in another decade Boeing and other industry giants will find a method that embraces used aluminum. Then I can ask how many cans (other than those in the flight attendants’ carts) really make it to the friendly skies.