1.How does the chemical composition and structure of a substance determine its properties with regard to its use, capacity for reuse, and capacity for recycling? I learned about chemical composition and how it affects how it is used. My topic was how aluminum is separated at a materials recovery facility. Aluminum is a metallic bond because it shares the same electron cloud that other metals have. What makes aluminum different is that its not magnetic like other metals. This makes it so it cant be separated by a permanent magnet. The property that is used my material recovery facilities is its electric conductivity. They then use eddy currents create a magnetic field that repels the aluminium. When aluminum is recycled and melted down it keeps all of its physical and chemical properties and this is because of how metal bond. The electrons align no matter what and this keeps the quality of the metal. WHen it comes to capacity for recycling it has a lot of benefits. It saves energy because aluminum scraps are used to make aluminum drinking cans.
2.How do the choices we make as consumers (purchasing, use, reuse, recycling, and discarding of materials) impact our local community and environment, and the global community and environment? There are many choices that we make in our daily lives that affect what happens in our community. WHen it comes to recycling we need to put things where they belong, If you throw away organic materials and those go to a landfill then as they decompose they don't have the oxygen they need it creates methane gas that is bad for the environment. When we went to phoenix recycling they were talking about how people don't take the time to separate plastics from other recycling and this can make it harder on them. I learned during this project that when buying products it is better to order online in the UK because the big companies have the resources to buy zero emission cars. This has a better impact on the environment.
3. What else did you learn through this project? During this project I learned alot about chemical properties and how elements interact with the world around us. Looking back on the bonding lab we had 8 substances and we had to find what kind of bond it was. There were a variety of ways to test it and those were electric conductivity, melting point, and reactivity with acid. When trying to figure out the kind of bond it was you had to factor in which one of these tests were more important. This taught me a lot about what makes a substance. Specifically in the recycling portion of the unit I learned a lot about how different materials are separated and how they use the properties to do that. For example, aluminum has to be separated by eddy currents opposed to a magnet because of its properties.