The problem with purity

摘要

At a recent visit to the Tandom aluminium-recycling plant,I was reminded of one of the biggest headaches of production that seems to be overlooked time and again in the packaging and wider converting industry.No matter how good the technology,how efficient the lines and how impressive the set-up,aluminium cannot be made more pure than the grade it is received at,and it is incredibly hard to keep generating the highest grade,even if that is exclusively what's being fed into the system as the impurities attached to the recycled material will downgrade the purity.Due to the multitude of ingenious solutions that we come across when looking at the converting market,it can be easy to forget that no matter how inventive we are,it is not possible to change the laws of nature and create a highest-grade product from impure ingredients.