Bauxite is a reddish-brown rock that contains aluminum, the lightweight metal used to make everything from soda cans to airplane bodies. Even though aluminum is one of the most common elements on Earth, it doesn't exist in pure form in nature. Instead, it's locked inside bauxite, mixed with oxygen and other materials.

To get aluminum out of bauxite, workers mine the rock from open pits, then heat and process it in factories using enormous amounts of electricity. It takes about four pounds of bauxite to produce one pound of aluminum. This process was so difficult to figure out that aluminum was once more precious than gold. In the 1850s, Napoleon III of France served his most honored dinner guests on aluminum plates, while everyone else used regular gold and silver.

Major bauxite deposits exist in tropical regions like Australia, Guinea, and Jamaica. Because extracting aluminum requires so much energy, recycling aluminum cans saves tremendous amounts of electricity compared to processing new bauxite. That recycled can could be back on a store shelf as a new can in just 60 days.