What kind of stuff is bauxite?
One of our useful everyday metals is aluminum. It is sturdy, durable and light to lift. If an aluminum cooking pot weighs two pounds, about 10 pounds of bauxite was used to make it. Bauxite is an aluminum ore. It is found in the ground with hundreds of other rocky and muddy minerals. Every year, the modern world creates about eight million tons of aluminum. You can write a long list of things we make from this light and sturdy metal. But chances are you would not be able to choose the right ingredients to make it. The main ingredient is bauxite, and bauxite does not look at all like silvery gray aluminum metal. Some of the earth’s bauxite is spread in muddy layers of soft clay. Some is in rocky lumps, sometimes pasty white and sometimes streaked or blotched with reds and yellows, pinks and assorted candy colored browns and tans. Rocky bauxite may be as soft as soapstone or gypsum and a bucket packed full of it weighs no more than two and a half buckets of water. The earth created her s
