Review of Ali, Saleem H., Soil to Foil: Aluminum and the Quest for Industrial Sustainability | Andrew Perchard

BOOK REVIEW

Soil to Foil: Aluminum and the Quest for Industrial Sustainability
by Saleem H. Ali

Columbia University Press
2023. 320 pp.
(cloth), ISBN 978-0-231-20448-4

Reviewed by Andrew Perchard (University of Otago)

Saleem Ali takes aluminum as the subject of his book, Soil to Foil. Ali’s focus is to deploy lessons from this ubiquitous metal to better understand the consumption of nonrenewable resources. While Saleem Ali approaches this from the perspective of geosciences and engineering, his subject is one that has been the subject of sustained debate across the humanities and physical and social sciences. As the Nobel Prize-winning economist Robert Solow remarked in his 1974 Ely lecture to the American Economic Association, “The world has been exhausting its exhaustible resources since the first cave-man chipped a flint, and I imagine the process will go on for a long, long time.”[1] Further back still, Solow looked for inspiration to the observations fellow US economist Harold Hotelling made in 1931.[2] Ali’s study of this important natural resource is timely given that aluminum was included in the US list of critical materials in 2022 and the European Union. Ali is Blue and Gold Distinguished Professor of Energy and the Environment at the University of Delaware and the author of a body of work on the sustainability of metals and the environmental impact of extractive industries. Ali acknowledges that his approach to this book is influenced by journalist Mark Kurlansky’s popular series of books on cod, oysters, paper, salmon, and salt. Like Kurlansky he seeks to probe crucial questions about abundance and scarcity and how science and industry have pushed natural limits. I come to this review as a historian with a research focus on energy and the extractive industries.

Aluminum, as Ali acknowledges, has a justifiable reputation for being the most recycled metal. It has historically been bolstered to some degree in the image as a cleaner metals industry in comparison to other ferrous and nonferrous metals, partly as a result of its historic reliance on hydroelectric power and in part due to industry marketing. However, he urges us to look beyond this rhetoric to interrogate all stages of the production process and to consider the considerable ecological impact of bauxite mining at one end of the chain and the waste in aluminum foil at the other. During the course of his research, he also consulted those involved in driving forward sustainability initiatives within the industry such as the Aluminium Stewardship Initiative. He seeks to offer potential solutions: from increasing recycling and other end-of-life recovery initiatives to greater equity in the industry’s dealings with local communities. He is correct in his gaze on the full cycle, but some measure of comparative analysis with other extractive industries would have provided a more nuanced understanding and acknowledgement of many of the leading aluminum companies’ relative historic proactivity in certain areas of the supply chain. Ali’s book is at its most illuminating when discussing the geoscience of aluminum, returning to the origins of life and covering in the process the metal’s occurrence in the earth’s crust (constituting 8 percent after oxygen’s 47 percent and silicon’s 28 percent).

In his preface, Ali observes: “Human progress is often defined by how well particular elements of the earth are harnessed: the Bronze Age, the Iron Age, and the Silicon Age are common delineations of history. Yet the most abundant metal in the earth’s crust, which has played a pivotal role in myriad technologies and inventions from aircraft to soda cans—aluminum—has largely been neglected in such lofty conversations about technological development” (p. xiii). The problem with this statement is that it is a mischaracterization; aluminum has spurred a vast anthropological, economic, historical, sociological, and political literature reaching back decades, including exploring the environmental impacts and technological developments within the industry and the contexts to those, and, unusually, its own historical institute, Institut pour l’histoire de l’aluminium. This body of extant work, neglected by Ali, includes some long-standing contributions studying the environmental impacts of aluminium production and sustainability.[3] This neglect is reflected in a patchy understanding of the industry. An illustration of this comes where Ali writes that “later attempts at forming a cartel for aluminum metal through the International Bauxite Association failed, and the metal began to be traded on the London Metals Exchange”(p. 26). The industry operated a number of international cartels, starting as early as 1901, with the most successful of these being the Alliance Aluminium Company (1931-38), which also fostered important cooperation in areas of research and development.[4] The International Bauxite Association was formed in 1974 by developing nations who wished to negotiate more equitable societal returns from aluminum multinationals for bauxite exports from their countries. Ali’s account consequently falls short in its understanding of the economics, politics, and social and technological factors which were also so crucial to the shaping of the metal.

Saleem Ali’s Soil to Foil is a welcome contribution in its examination of pressing questions over sustainability and scarcity from a geoscience perspective but falls short in its analysis of all-important economic, social, and technological factors shaping the industry.

Notes

[1]. Robert M. Solow, “Richard T. Ely Lecture: The Economics of Resources or the Resources of Economics,” American Economic Review 64, no. 2 (1974): 1-14, quotation on 1.

[2]. Harold Hotelling, “The Economics of Exhaustible Resources,” Journal of Political Economy 39, no. 2 (1931): 137-75.

[3]. For example: Bradford Barham, Stephen G. Bunker, and Denis O’Hearn, eds., States, Firms, and Raw Materials: The World Economy and Ecology of Aluminum (University of Wisconsin Press, 1994); Matthew Evenden, Fish Versus Power: An Environmental History of the Fraser River (Cambridge University Press, 2004); Felix Padel and Samarendra Das, Out of This Earth: East Indian Adivasis and the Aluminium Cartel (Orient Black Swan); and Carl A. Zimring, Aluminum Upcycled: Sustainable Design in Historical Perspective (John Hopkins University Press, 2017).

[4]. Marco Bertilorenzi, The International Aluminium Cartel: The Business and Politics of a Cooperative Industrial Institution, 1886–1978 (Routledge, 2016).

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