I just got back from an engineering conference in Detroit on
"lightweighting" cars and trucks, which was an exceptionally good one,
but one mundane fact set me back in my chair. Ford has four stamping
plants making body parts for the new aluminum F-150. At the biggest
one, at the old Rouge plant, their stamping line fills an
11-ton-capacity truck with aluminum stamping scrap every 20 minutes.
The trucks are lined up to haul it back to the mills.

That's a lot of aluminum. All of the US and European car makers have
high-quantity aluminum vehicles in the works, and the world's aluminum
producers have been building new plants just to deal with it.

Ford will make around 600,000 F-150s this year, so the scrap rate
isn't three-shifts every day, but still...

--
Ed Huntress