Awards

• Winner of Choice Outstanding Academic Title 2023

Overview

Aluminum is the most abundant metal in the earth's crust. It is also ubiquitous in the modern world, from aircraft to soda cans. A dizzying number of consumer and industrial products employ aluminum, typically alloyed, because of its availability, versatility, and malleability. Today, how efficiently we use-and reuse-aluminum is vital to addressing key environmental challenges and understanding humanity's fraught relationship with the earth. Soil to Foil tells the extraordinary story of aluminum. Saleem H. Ali reveals its pivotal role in the histories of scientific inquiry and technological innovation as well as its importance to sustainability. He offers compelling portraits of the scientists and innovators who discovered new uses for this remarkable element, ranging from chemistry and geoscience to engineering and industrial design. Ali argues that aluminum exemplifies broader lessons about stewardship of nonrenewable resources: its seeming abundance has given rise to wasteful and destructive practices. Soil to Foil follows aluminum's path along the supply chain, from extraction to production, consumption to recycling. Ali explores the ecological damage at mine sites and visits affected communities seeking to restore the land. He foregrounds the possibilities for more sustainable industrial practices, emphasizing how product design can incorporate eventual reuse and recycling. Ultimately, Soil to Foil shows that the story of aluminum's use and misuse helps us rethink how to sustainably manage the resources of our planet.

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Reviews

Soil to Foil shows the profound connections between the atomic properties of aluminum and the gigantic entanglements of the world we live in via economics, politics, environmental laws, science, technology, industrial design, advertising, and more. It is one thing to simply say 'yes, we know this,' but quite another to be skillfully guided through a much deeper and ever more vital understanding of all these matters, which Ali so admirably does. -- Tyler Volk, professor emeritus, New York University, and author of <i>Quarks to Culture</i> Soil to Foil considers the 'extraction' of the chemical processes used to turn aluminum ore into usable resources, fitting within a broader turn in the social sciences to considering the socio-material and socio-technical dimensions of the world we live in. Ali persuasively shows why materiality and chemical composition matters for how aluminum 'comes to be' as a resource. -- Jessica M. Smith, Department of Engineering and Society, Colorado School of Mines

Author Information

Saleem H. Ali is Blue and Gold Distinguished Professor of Energy and the Environment at the University of Delaware and a senior fellow at Columbia University’s Center on Sustainable Investment. He is a member of the United Nations International Resource Panel and the Scientific and Technical Advisory Panel of the Global Environment Facility. Ali’s books include Earthly Order: How Natural Laws Define Human Life (2022).

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