The Element of Surprise
You might associate it with the foil that wraps leftover pizza and the shiny craft beer cans sold in breweries, but aluminum is literally everywhere. Scoop up a handful of soil or gravel anywhere on Earth and you’ll find atoms of bonded aluminum hidden inside. Over the past 150 years, that abundance has led production of the silvery metal to skyrocket (pun intended) and created an industry responsible for 2-3% of global greenhouse gas emissions.
But even before it was used in everything from airplanes to deodorant, the trade of aluminum minerals helped color the world, finance the Vatican, and led to the mass collection of human urine.
In this episode, we’re piloting a new segment called “The Element of Surprise.” It’s all about the hidden histories behind the periodic table’s most unassuming atoms, isotopes, and molecules. And we’re kicking things off with aluminum.
Featuring Saleem Ali. Aluminum photographs by Wojciech Kulicki, and George Estreich (CC BY NC-ND 2.0)
Editor's note: A previous version of this episode misstated the number of Allied casualties during a 1943 bombing campaign against a German cryolite factory, claiming all but one of 180 bombers were destroyed. In actuality, all but one of 180 bombers returned home safely. The episode has been corrected.
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LINKS
The World Economic Forum has published a number of studies and articles on the need to decarbonize the aluminum industry and the promising technologies that might help us get there.
A few years ago, Alcoa announced plans to build a new aluminum smelting plant in Maniitsoq, Greenland. PBS’s POV released an excellent documentary about how people there reckoned with the island’s colonial past as the project progressed, stalled, and eventually collapsed.
The National Park Service has a fun little read about the Washington Monument’s aluminum tip.
Sean Adams, at the University of Florida, wrote an excellent recap of the U.S. government’s antitrust case against aluminum giant Alcoa.
Here’s another one from Foreign Policy about how industrial cartels and monopolies helped Hitler gain power.
Check out Charlie Halloran’s “The Alcoa Sessions,” to imagine what kind of music might have been played during Alcoa’s cruise voyages between New Orleans and Jamaica between 1949 and 1959.
CREDITS
Host: Nate Hegyi
Reported, mixed, and produced by Taylor Quimby
Mixed by Taylor Quimby
Editing by Rebecca Lavoie, with help from Nate Hegyi and Felix Poon
Our staff includes Justine Paradis
Executive producer: Taylor Quimby
Rebecca Lavoie is NHPR’s Director of On-Demand Audio
Music by Blue Dot Sessions, Ryan James Carr, and L.M. Styles
Outside/In is a production of New Hampshire Public Radio
Submit a question to the “Outside/Inbox.” We answer queries about the natural world, climate change, sustainability, and human evolution. You can send a voice memo to outsidein@nhpr.org or leave a message on our hotline, 1-844-GO-OTTER (844-466-8837).
Audio Transcript
Note: Episodes of Outside/In are made as pieces of audio, and some context and nuance may be lost on the page. Transcripts are generated using a combination of speech recognition software and human transcribers, and may contain errors.
Taylor Quimby: Hey, Nate.
Nate Hegyi: Hey, Taylor.
Taylor Quimby: Out of curiosity, what are some things that you think we take for granted? And, I mean, like, physical objects and materials, not like people.
Nate Hegyi: I think we take for granted paper bags. Bags and cardboard boxes. I think we take for granted. The construction of a cardboard box is actually pretty amazing.
Taylor Quimby: You forget that cardboard is wood.
Nate Hegyi: It's made out of pulp. Exactly.
Taylor Quimby: So, lately, one thing that I've been fixated on that I think we take for granted… I'll give you a hint. It is the go to material used to wrap leftover pizza.
Nate Hegyi: Oh. Aluminum foil!
Taylor Quimby: Yeah.
[SFX aluminum foil]
Nate Hegyi: I just think about how much aluminum foil I throw away. And it's metal.
Taylor Quimby: Like a purified, isolated metal that's been pounded into a sheet less than a millimeter thick, that you can just crumple up like paper and throw in the garbage.
[Mux swell and crumpling SFX]
Nate Hegyi: Every like baking show is like. Wrap your salmon in aluminum foil…
Taylor Quimby: Wrap this metal pan with...
Nate Hegyi: More metal...
Taylor Quimby: …A thin layer of metal!
Nate Hegyi: …And then throw away that greasy foil.
Taylor Quimby: And then there's, you know…
[SFX of aluminum soda can being popped open]
Nate Hegyi: Ah, how's that Sprite. You a Sprite drinker?
Taylor Quimby: No, I don't drink much soda. I stole this from the staff kitchen.
[mux swell and fade]
For nearly all of human history, aluminum has been basically invisible. The stapler was invented before scientists actually succeeded in isolating enough aluminum to study it.
Nate Hegyi: Really?
Taylor Quimby: But today, it is so ubiquitous that its production accounts for somewhere between 2 and 3% of all global greenhouse gas emissions.
Nate Hegyi: Is making aluminum.
Taylor Quimby: 2 to 3%.
Nate Hegyi: So we're really taking aluminum for granted.
Taylor Quimby: And maybe we shouldn't.
News Clip: A shortage of aluminum is impacting the supply of a wide range of goods. In the US. Aluminum is in short supply. And that's leading to shortages in both the cat food aisle and at your local brewery.
[mux swells]
Nate Hegyi: This is Outside/In. I'm Nate Hegyi, and today producer Taylor Quimby is piloting a new segment we are calling The Element of Surprise. It's all about the hidden histories behind the periodic tables, most unassuming atoms, isotopes and ions.
Taylor Quimby: And we are kicking things off with good old number 13 on the table. This is my buddy “Al”. Or, as David Attenborough might call him, Mr. Aluminium.
Nate Hegyi: [laughs] That's a really good David Attenborough.
Taylor Quimby: And I believe this story may tell us a thing or two about the strangeness and beauty of chemistry, as well as the laws of supply and demand.
Nate Hegyi: Stay tuned.
[mux swells and fades]
Taylor Quimby: All right, so, Nate, I want you to take a guess. How common do you think aluminum is compared to other elements in the Earth's crust?
Nate Hegyi: Like a percentage? 3%.
Taylor Quimby: 3%. Okay. I think it's helpful to have a comparison. If you took all the gold that's ever been mined by human beings. Every ring bracelet, every flake, in every bottle of Goldschlager... And you added all of the gold still left underground that we can still mine.
Nate Hegyi: Yeah.
Taylor Quimby: …It would probably fit inside the Empire State Building.
Nate Hegyi: Really?
Taylor Quimby: That's how rare gold actually is.
[mux]
Nate Hegyi: Okay, so can I revise my guess? Sure. As parts of New York City. If gold is the Empire State Building, I am going to say that aluminum is all of Central Park.
Taylor Quimby: I think you are way, way, way under because about 8% of the entire Earth's crust is made up of aluminum.
Nate Hegyi: So it's oh, it's all of like New York City.
Taylor Quimby: It's like the United States! It's like Canada, and the United States. It's about as much as every other metal combined.
Nate Hegyi: Wow.
Saleem Ali: Aluminum is in a different ballpark altogether.
Taylor Quimby: So this is Saleem Ali. He studies environmental conflicts, particularly around mining. He is also a member of the UN's International Resource Panel. And he's the author of a book called Soil to Foil, which is all about aluminum.
Nate Hegyi: That's a clever title.
Saleem Ali: You know, people have written a lot about gold. They've written about, uh, silver, rare earth minerals also. But aluminum is kind of blah. You know, people are like, “it's boring,” but it's everywhere!
[mux swells and fades]
Taylor Quimby: So let's get one thing straight. Even though there is an absolute ton of aluminum in the crust of the Earth, you cannot find a nugget of aluminum anywhere in the natural world. What I mean, have you ever heard of, like, I don't know, people panning for aluminum?
Nate Hegyi: No, I guess.
Taylor Quimby: Not, because all of it is tightly bonded to other elements.
Saleem Ali: So aluminum is really attracted to oxygen. And that's one of the reasons it's so hard to extract is because the bonds it forms with oxygen are so strong that you need a lot of energy to isolate the metal. So aluminum metal does not exist in metallic form in the Earth on its own.
Taylor Quimby: Instead, you know, what you have basically are what are called aluminosilicate rocks. So just as an example, like I live in New Hampshire, we call ourselves the Granite State. Well, granite has aluminum in it.
Nate Hegyi: Oookay.
Taylor Quimby: But for most of human history, we didn't even know this stuff existed. Like copper was discovered more than 10,000 years ago. Aluminum was isolated almost exactly 200 years ago. And so for most of that time in between, our interaction with aluminum has been through salt.
[mux creeps in]
Have you ever heard of “alum?”
Nate Hegyi: Sounds like a slight misspelling of Alan, a guy I know.
Taylor Quimby: [laughs] Yeah. Okay, so the word alum comes from the Latin phrase for “bitter salt”. And this is where the word aluminum comes from.
Saleem Ali: Alum is a basically a complex set of salts of aluminum.
Taylor Quimby: And thousands of years ago, people discovered that these naturally occurring salt crystals had special powers.
Saleem Ali: Even now, uh, alum is used as an antiperspirant because it's able to absorb moisture in certain ways and also has odor control properties and so on.
Nate Hegyi: Oh! That's why people are always like, warning you,
don't use the antiperspirant,” which, by the way, I've gone down this rabbit hole…. It's not that big of a deal. It’s because it's got aluminum in it!
Taylor Quimby: Right. But in ancient times, alum was used for very different reasons. Uh, Egyptians used it to speed up the mummification process.
Saleem Ali: The other use of alum that was really important in antiquity was, um, as a mordant.
Taylor Quimby: So this is the big one, a mordant.
Saleem Ali: A mordant is a chemical which is used to keep color onto fabric and textiles. If you had a fabric that you wanted to color, uh, you needed to first add alum so that that dye from the color would stay on and it wouldn't wash off later.
Taylor Quimby: Did you understand that?
Nate Hegyi: It holds it. It holds it to the middle aged t-shirt that you're tie dyeing.
Taylor Quimby: Yeah. Your tunic.
Nate Hegyi: Your tunic? Yeah. Your tie-dye tunics and togas. It's a binder.
Taylor Quimby: And you can imagine how important that would be in the ancient world. Right? Like color has so much significance. Like purple and blue dyes were so hard to come by that they were a sign of of wealth and power. And so that means that over the centuries, alum has been incredibly valuable, which led to the formation of what I like to call wait for it, the “Aluminati.”
Nate Hegyi: Oh, man, it sounds like we're about to go down some, uh, some conspiracy rabbit holes.
Taylor Quimby: Dan Brown, watch out.
Saleem Ali: Alum was very much on the forefront of the Catholic Church's business enterprises. That was partly for financial reasons, but also because they used alum for the fabrics that the clergy wore.
Taylor Quimby: Okay. So in the mid 1400s, a huge alum mine was discovered in some Italian mountains that were controlled by the papacy.
Um, have you ever heard of the Medicis?
Nate Hegyi: Rings a bell, but I don't know what it is.
Taylor Quimby: So they're this powerful merchant family in Florence. Uh, they're sometimes called “the Godfathers of the Renaissance.” Okay? They were bankers. They were patrons of Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo. Supposedly, they are responsible for the invention of the piano.
Nate Hegyi: See, I feel like all of this… What you're telling me right now is, like, in the title card of a TV show I'm about to watch.
Taylor Quimby: It actually is a TV show!
Nate Hegyi: Yes! Exactly.
Medici clip: “Crystals.” “Not just ordinary crystals. Processed alum.” “In the textile industry, this is more precious than gold.”
Taylor Quimby: So a non insignificant portion of the Medicis wealth came from the alum trade. And that's because the Pope gave them sole control over those mines they found in exchange for big royalties and a cut of the profits.
Medici clip: “I wish to give the Pope a peace offering, and you will carry it to him.”
Taylor Quimby: So by 1477, the Pope estimated that one third of the entire Catholic Church's revenue was coming from alum salts. Wow.
Nate Hegyi: Move over gold. Aluminum. That's the real power.
[mux swells and fades]
Taylor Quimby: One more fun fact from this time, if you know your British history, you'll know that Henry the Eighth split off from the Catholic Church because he kept taking and killing wives. Well, when that happened, the entire British kingdom basically got cut off from the alum supply. And there was a generation of very drab, colorless English clothing, like, for decades. And then later – don't ask me how, but it probably had to do with somebody peeing on a wall – they discovered this type of shale, another rock that was rich in aluminum, and when processed with human pee, also created crystals of alum.
Nate Hegyi: They're just peeing on everything.
Taylor Quimby: Back then, during the peak of production in the 18th century, the English alum industry required 400,000 pounds of urine every year. So people in London would, like leave buckets of pee on street corners for collection.
Nate Hegyi: You know people talk about like, oh, what year would you go back into a time machine… You know, like if you had a time machine, what year would you go back to? I've learned now that I'm avoiding this entire era because I got a thing about the smell of pee. I really hate it. And I can just imagine London would just stink.
Taylor Quimby: I'm pretty sure that it would have just been one of many not so great aromas that were drifting about at the time.
Nate Hegyi: Not a great time to go back to.
[mux swell, fades - goes to ad break]
Nate Hegyi: This is Outside/In. I'm Nate Hegyi, and this is our first installment of The Element of Surprise. Taylor just told us all about alum, the aluminum salt that colored the world and kept the Vatican rich during the Middle Ages.
Taylor Quimby: So this basically brings us to the period of time when chemists finally figured out how to isolate aluminum.
Nate Hegyi: Why were they doing that, by the way? Like what was the motivation?
Taylor Quimby: We're talking the mid 1800s. This is a period of great scientific inquiry when, you know, we're birthing the modern science of chemistry. And so there is this huge effort to isolate all sorts of things.
Nate Hegyi: Gotcha.
Taylor Quimby: But you would have to imagine this would have been like alchemy, like magic, because scientists were basically taking dirt and clay soil. Yeah. And transforming it into something that looked like silver, except aluminum is lighter! It's resistant to corrosion.
Nate Hegyi: Yeah.
Taylor Quimby: The French emperor Napoleon the third, personally funded a ton of research into aluminum because he thought it had a lot of potential for war. Yeah, but he also reportedly held a banquet where all the, like, super VIPs were given these rare aluminum silverware, and everybody else just had to deal with gold silverware.Like, “ugh.”
Nate Hegyi: I just imagined these little, like, foil knives that they've like shaped. And they're like, “oh, this is high class right here.”
Taylor Quimby: They're trying to cut a steak. [laughs]
Nate Hegyi: “It's okay, it's okay. Because this is high class. We'll just take ten minutes of diligent cutting.”
[mux]
Taylor Quimby: So this is a time when a ton of very influential people are predicting aluminum will be the metal of the future. So the author, Jules Verne science fiction legend, built a fictional spacecraft out of it in one of his books, which was very prescient. Charles Dickens wrote, quote, “aluminum may probably send tin to the right about face, drive copper saucepans into penal servitude and blow up German silver sky high into nothing.”
Nate Hegyi: He's not wrong.
Taylor Quimby: And by the end of the 19th century, the US government was on board. They were building the Washington Monument, and they wanted the tip to be made from some, like, really precious symbolic metal. Yeah. Guess what the Washington monuments tip is made out of?
Nate Hegyi: Oh, I don't know, aluminum.
Taylor Quimby: Which was very expensive at the time, so they were very proud of themselves.
[mux]
So all of this is leading up to the industrial shift that made aluminum a household item and frankly, dropped the price down by many, many factors. And that is that in 1886, two people independently discovered a much more effective process for extracting aluminum. One of those guys was named Charles Hall.
Saleem Ali: Though both of them found this process. Hall is the one who is remembered and was successful because he was not only a great chemist, he had a business acumen.
Taylor Quimby: This again is Saleem Ali, author of Soil to Foil: Aluminum and the Quest for Industrial Sustainability.
Saleem Ali: … and he became the founder of Alcoa, which is still one of the world's largest aluminum companies.
Taylor Quimby: I'm embarrassed to admit that I have never heard of this company before working on this story. Did you know Alcoa?
Nate Hegyi: No. They must be some shadow company lurking in the background, providing us our our much needed essential aluminum.
Vintage Alcoa commercial: Alcoa! Aluminum Company of America.
Taylor Quimby: So this is the late 1800s into the early 1900s. The aluminum industry is like building up, getting bigger and bigger and bigger.
Vintage WWII newsreel: A mile of aluminum for the bodies, the wings, the motors of planes. Geared to produce 1.5 billion pounds a year for military requirements alone. America is winning the battle of production!
Saleem Ali: Aluminum became a strategic metal. Especially the aircraft industry was one of its properties as it's very light and it's strong and light, which is unusual for metals.
Taylor Quimby: So I read about this enough now to say it's fair that the outcome of World War Two hinged, at least in part, on aluminum and Alcoa. That company we talked about did some things that both helped - and HURT the Allies.
Nate Hegyi: Ooooh.
Taylor Quimby: This is not something that shows up on their About Us page.
Nate Hegyi: [laughs] I’m sure.
Taylor Quimby: But I have dug around and I discovered that Alcoa formed an aluminum cartel with a German company in the early 30s.
Nate Hegyi: What’s a cartel by the way? Like I know cartels as like, drug cartels, but what’s the textbook definition of a cartel.
Taylor Quimby: Well you know, like OPEC? The oil cartel?
Nate Hegyi: Yeah.
Taylor Quimby: It’s a group of huge producers who by coordinating together, basically eliminate competition.
And what they were trying to do was fix aluminum prices and keep them high - but in effect, their agreements effectively throttled our domestic supply of, while helping the Nazis become the biggest aluminum producers in the world at that time. And then, when it was time for America to ramp up production for the war, they had a textbook monopoly on aluminum in the US. And you can literally hear this in their marketing materials.
Vintage Alcoa ad: That's the kind of industrial magic Alcoa and only Alcoa is able to accomplish.
[mux swells and fades]
Taylor Quimby: They're like 20s, 30s. Radio voice is just the best. I love it, Alcoa.
Nate Hegyi: [Imitates vintage Alcoa commercial] Alcoa! First we gave to the Nazis, now we'll give to you!
Taylor Quimby: But actually, I think this may have spurred one of the clearest examples of what people call the military industrial complex. Back then, the chemical process to separate aluminum from aluminum ore required this very unique mineral called cryolite.
Saleem Ali: Cryolite, which became this hugely strategic mineral. You know, nowadays we talk about critical minerals and we talk about lithium and cobalt and all Cryolite was this most important mineral because there was only one mine in the world. And that was guess where in Greenland, of all places.
Taylor Quimby: So you remember from an old episode of ours where we talked about the first ice core. We talked about how Greenland used to be a Danish colony. Yeah. So when the Nazis invaded Denmark during World War Two, the US went in and occupied Greenland. And we did that to protect the Cryolite mine so we could keep producing aluminum for the war.
Nate Hegyi: Which makes complete sense. That's why you would go into Greenland to protect Greenland in the middle of a war.
Taylor Quimby: When I was researching this, it made me wonder. I was like, oh, well, if it's the only mine in the world, then how is Germany getting their cryolite? Yeah, well, Germany figured out how to make a synthetic form of this same mineral, so they didn't need it. Uh, which is why in 1943, towards the end of the war, we sent 180 bombers to blow up their synthetic cryolite factory. Uh, and it was such an important mission. We sacrificed almost all of those planes and human beings in them. Only one plane survived.
[mux]
So after the war, the aluminum industry changed again. First, the US government actually stepped in and dealt with the Alcoa monopoly. It is a landmark antitrust case in the US. And they were forced to sell huge portions of their business off for pennies on the dollar. And they sold it to two other big aluminum companies. One of them is called Reynolds. Yeah, as in Reynolds Wrap.
Nate Hegyi: We know them.
Taylor Quimby: Don't know if you know this, but their money, by the way, is built on tobacco.
Cigarette ad: See how mild and good tasting cigarette can be.
Taylor Quimby: And then there were the Kaisers, whose construction company built the Hoover Dam, but also who later established the health care initiative Kaiser Permanente.
Nate Hegyi: No kidding.
Taylor Quimby: Yeah. Uh, but today, despite the antitrust case in the 40s, Alcoa is still the biggest aluminum company of those three.
Saleem Ali: Alcoa used to run cruises in, uh, the Caribbean. They had a whole cruise ship enterprise. And there was another ulterior reason to it, because a lot of the aluminum that was mined by Alcoa came from Jamaica, uh, and the Caribbean islands.
Taylor Quimby: Do you think people should be paying attention to, you know, Alcoa? I don't think is a household name the way like ExxonMobil is. Um, it.
Saleem Ali: Used to be, uh, in the 1930s and 40s. It was. Uh, unlike gold or gemstones, which can be artisanally mined. Uh, aluminum you do need scale. And that's why a lot of national, uh, governments are involved in mining of aluminum. So you have, in the case of Russia, you have the Russian aluminum company. In China, you have Chinalco. Uh, and that is also led to, in the case of private enterprises, of course, that leads to concentration of wealth. And that has happened with other minerals as well. Because of the structure of the industry, it leads to natural monopolies and concentration of wealth as well.
Taylor Quimby: So all this Nate, brings us to today…
[mux begins]
Aluminum is a staggeringly ubiquitous metal.
It’s used in construction. Kitchen appliances. Spaceships. Bicycles. Fireworks. Makeup. Your iPhone is made up of aluminum alloys.
Nate Hegyi: Really? I didn’t know that.
Taylor Quimby: Well, parts of it are.
Nate Hegyi: I thought it was mostly made of glass. Because it breaks all the time.
Taylor Quimby: Juice-boxes have a thin layer of aluminum that keeps them shelf-stable. It’s used in vaccines and antacid medicines. You can get wedding bands made of aluminum.
Nate Hegyi: What a gift! I can’t wait to get my wife an aluminum wedding ring.
Taylor Quimby: And because we use so much of it - and it takes so much energy to produce - the production of this one metal accounts for 2-3 percent of all global greenhouse gas emissions.
Nate Hegyi: Wow! That’s a lot.
Taylor Quimby: That is a lot. And now there's a new Illuminati in charge, because in 2000, the US was still the leading producer of aluminum. Today we have just 2% of global market share compared to China, which has 58% control over the market.
Nate Hegyi: That is a that is a Republican talking point. You hear a lot when talking about any kind of mining that we do in the United States. There's always the argument of like, better to do it here with the environmental regulations that we have versus exporting it to a country that doesn't have those same environmental regulations.
Taylor Quimby: Right. And so that even though, you know, aluminum, like we talked about 8% of the crust, it is technically everywhere. And yet we go through these waves of shortages now where the prices are going up and availability is getting squeezed. The war in Ukraine has contributed to aluminum shortages because Russia has a lot of aluminum smelters.
News clip: The US is considering a total ban on Russian aluminum in response to the military escalation in Ukraine...
Taylor Quimby: And you might have heard recently that President Biden is looking to triple tariffs on Chinese aluminum.
President Biden: They’re not competing - they’re cheating. They’re cheating.
Taylor Quimby: But all of this stuff is really tricky because finding low carbon aluminum sources is a really pivotal part of the transition to renewable energy.
Saleem Ali: Yeah, no, I am concerned about, um, what I call the material energy nexus for the green transition, um, that we haven't thought it through. You know, when we talk about we have these targets for the Paris Agreement. We have not done good calculations on really? What are the material needs for that, uh, target and what choices need to be made?
Nate Hegyi: It kind of goes back to this idea of like, the stuff we have in our lives costs a lot to create, and not just money. It might feel cheap, but it's not cheap. It takes a lot of energy to create, whether it's a lithium ion battery or aluminum foil. And it always strikes me that part of that transition is trying to not be so disposable with our stuff, you know?
Saleem Ali: I mean, with the aluminum, the good news is that because we have already extracted it now for over a century, there is a lot of the metal lying around in infrastructure. We have to find better ways of harnessing it.
Taylor Quimby: And so much of that has to do with economics. The good thing about aluminum is that it actually takes way less energy, and is cheaper to recycle than it is to make more of this stuff. Even things like aluminum foil - whatever you wrap your pizza in, or those take-out containers you get - you can actually throw those in the recycling bin and they can get used it again.
Nate Hegyi: Oh! Did not know that. I thought I had to toss it because it was dirty.
Taylor Quimby: You could fashion it into a wedding ring.
Nate Hegyi: A stinky salmon flavored wedding ring.
Saleem Ali: Ultimately, if we understand chemistry well, we can have a much more sustainable society. It's trying to understand those relationships between molecules and seeing how we can have more efficient usage of them.
Taylor Quimby: Uh, so that's it for this week, Nate. Um, listeners, tell us what you think about our new segment, the element of surprise. Uh, what element do you think we should cover next? Could be one of the noble gasses. Could be one of those weird ones at the end with super hard names. You can catch us, uh, at Instagram or X or send us an email to outsidein@nhpr.org.
Nate Hegyi: This episode was reported, produced, and mixed by our executive producer Taylor Quimby. It was edited by Rebecca Lavoie. Our staff includes Justine Paradise and Felix Poon. Rebecca Lavoie is NPR's director of On Demand audio.
Taylor Quimby: Special thanks to Saleem Ali for the interview. His book, again, is called Soil to Foil Aluminum and the quest for Industrial Sustainability. And one thing that I'd really recommend watching, if you like this episode, there's this documentary by POV called Winter's Yearning, and it's this very complex story in Greenland where a few years ago, Alcoa announced that they were going to be opening a new aluminum smelting factory. It's an interesting watch, so you should check that out.
Nate Hegyi: Music in this episode by blue Dot sessions.
Taylor Quimby: Also from Ryan James Carr And L.M.Styles
Nate Hegyi: Thanks for listening. Outside-in is a production of NHPR.
Taylor Quimby: Outside in is a production of New Hampshire Public.