Home > News

Apple Patent Shows Macs Made from Recycled Cans

By Laura Tucker
Macbook Air Recycled Beer Cans Featured

When you toss your beer and pop cans into the recycling bin, then drag that out to the curb, have you ever wondered where they go next? The answer may surprise you. One destination is that shiny new Mac you just bought. Apple revealed in two patent applications it’s been using its own custom alloy made from recycled beer and pop cans.

Apple’s Custom Alloy

Apple is widely known for caring about the environment. This made it no surprise when it announced it was using recycled aluminum in the 2018 MacBook Air. The company reduced the Air’s carbon footprint by 50 percent by using 100% aluminum.

Apple said when introducing the 2018 MacBook Air, “To accomplish this, we invented a new custom alloy. It’s designed to use fine shavings of recaptured aluminum that are re-engineered down to the atomic level. This new alloy is as beautiful and robust as any we’ve used before, and it makes MacBook Air the greenest Mac ever.”

Macbook Air Recycled Beer Cans Custom Alloy
.

But in 2018, Apple didn’t mention where the “recaptured aluminum” came from. Laura Legros, the company’s vice president of Hardware Engineering, only said the material came from “excess aluminum from the production process.”

Patent Discovery

More of Apple’s process of creating its custom alloy was discovered in one of two patents it recently filed. The patent was titled: “Heat-Treatable Aluminum Alloy Made from Used Beverage Can Scrap.” This patent described how recycled aluminum beer and pop cans were used to create Apple’s custom alloy.

Before you start looking at your MacBook Air and wondering how it could be nothing more than old beer and pop cans, the final metal that is produced is more than just the cans. Other recycled materials are used as well.

The patent application describes the process as a “cosmetic” aluminum that is difficult to create from recycled cans. This is why separate layers are created from different materials. With the surface layer needing to be cosmetic, the substrate layer uses the recycled cans. Inside the pretty finish is a layer trying to help the environment.

Macbook Air Recycled Beer Cans Closed

For those who wonder why Apple products are more expensive, this could be one important reason. It spends much effort and time creating special materials and processes for important reasons like saving the environment. But the cost gets passed off to you, the end-user.

What is unanswered is why Apple is applying for a patent for the custom alloy process now, three years after the product was used in the MacBook Air for the first time. Perhaps Apple has added to it or changed it in some way. Or perhaps the company is realizing the success of the custom alloy made from recycled beer cans and wants to patent it before using it on more Apple products.

If saving the environment is important to you, you may want to make your next computer purchase a Mac. If you decide to go in that direction, read on to learn how to sync iMessages on iOS and macOS and how to use your Mac more efficiently.

Subscribe to our newsletter!

Our latest tutorials delivered straight to your inbox

Laura Tucker Avatar
Laura Tucker
Laura has spent more than 20 years writing news, reviews, and op-eds, with the majority of those years as an editor as well. She has exclusively used Apple products for the past 35 years. In addition to writing and editing at MTE, she also runs the site’s sponsored review program.

Read next

When the SS Great Eastern laid the first working transatlantic telegraph cable in 1866, a message that had taken ten days by steamship suddenly crossed the ocean in minutes, and the financial markets of London and New York were forced, within a single trading week, to invent the modern concept of synchronised global price.
From below of blue starry sky over radio telescope and trees with leaves
The Big Ear telescope was scanning at 1420.4056 megahertz on the night of 15 August 1977, the exact frequency at which hydrogen atoms vibrate across the universe, because Giuseppe Cocconi and Philip Morrison had argued years earlier that any species trying to be found would broadcast on that channel — and then, for 72 seconds, something did.
In 2016, archaeologists dated two rings of snapped stalagmites in France’s Bruniquel Cave to 176,500 years ago, evidence that Neanderthals had walked 336 metres into darkness with fire and built architecture deep underground long before modern humans reached Europe
Otto von Bismarck was 74 when Germany adopted the world’s first national old-age social insurance program in 1889, setting the pension age at 70 after years of fighting socialists with bans, laws, and a promise few workers would live long enough to use
When cosmonaut Valeri Polyakov stepped out of his Soyuz capsule in March 1995 after 437 consecutive days aboard Mir, doctors recorded him at several centimetres above his pre-flight height, and his spine had become so unaccustomed to gravity that the recovery team carried him to a chair rather than risk the compression of letting him walk.
When Bell Labs engineer Karl Jansky pointed a rotating antenna at the sky in 1932 looking for sources of transatlantic radio static, he kept picking up a faint hiss that peaked every 23 hours and 56 minutes, and he eventually realized he had become the first human to hear the center of the Milky Way.
A contemplative scene with two scientists in a vintage laboratory setting.
When Harvard astronomer Cecilia Payne submitted her 1925 doctoral thesis arguing that the Sun was made almost entirely of hydrogen, the field’s senior figure Henry Norris Russell talked her into adding a line calling the result ‘almost certainly not real,’ and then published the same conclusion himself four years later to widespread acclaim.
When seismic waves from the Chicxulub impact reached what is now North Dakota roughly ten minutes after the asteroid struck, they appear to have triggered a ten-metre standing wave in an inland river that flung fish onto the bank and buried them under glass beads still falling from the sky.