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Aluminium & Durability – Towards Sustainable Cities

Published in

2014

The first publication in the Towards Sustainable Cities research programme, which quantifies the in-use benefits of aluminium in architecture and the built environment. 

The durability of aluminium is probably one of the most important qualities of this metal when used to form architecture and infrastructure.  This book charts over 100 years of the use of aluminium in architecture and the built environment using 50 built works from 1895 to 1986, with four historic exemplars being inspected and presented in-depth. Twelve twentieth-century award-winning and historically significant aluminium-based buildings were inspected, leading to the successful non-destructive testing of aluminium finishes on three of these projects.

The research was undertaken by Michael Stacey Architects with KieranTimberlake and the Architecture and Tectonics Research Group (ARTG) of The University of Nottingham, UK and funded by the IAI.

Other publications in the series include Aluminium Recyclability and Recycling, Aluminium Life Cycle Thinking, Aluminium: Flexible and Light and Aluminium: Sympathetic & Powerful – all of which are available to download on the right.

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Eunomia was commissioned by the Global Beverage Can Circularity Alliance (GBCCA) to calculate the collected for recycling and recycling rates for aluminium cans, PET bottles, and glass bottles across global markets.  Conducted in 2025 as the first in a three-year series, the research captured data representing 90% of the global market ...

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IAI-Industry&Sustainability
IAI-Recycling

In 2022, the IAI published Guidelines on Transparency that state that when reporting the cradle-to-gate carbon footprint of products that contain scrap there should be full transparency on the methodology used for the carbon footprint calculation. This reference document, summarising three potential approaches, should serve aluminium producers to disclose the methodology they ...

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