You’ve found a treasure!
Raw material aluminium
First take a screenshot of the treasure picture to add it to your collection of resources. To do so, just scroll down a little.
You’ll also learn lots of exciting facts about lithium, a treasure of the future!
You don’t quite get what this is all about? Then take a look below to find out how you can take part in the treasure hunt!
Take a screenshot here!
Interesting facts about aluminium
✨ Congratulations! You’ve found something that has a real talent for being recycled. Aluminium is almost completely recyclable – to more than 90 percent. And that’s particularly good, because aluminium is found in many of the things we use every day. Just take a look around:
Aluminium compounds
In nature, aluminium is only found in compounds. Bauxite contains the highest aluminium concentration. It’s an ore that occurs in the Earth’s crust. Bauxite is crushed and mixed with a hot solution of caustic soda lye and lime. The mixture is then heated, filtered and dried.
Two further ingredients are required to obtain pure aluminium from the aluminium oxide – also known as alumina – namely, electricity and carbon. In an energy-intensive electrolysis process, the carbon reacts with the oxygen in the alumina to form CO2. What remains is liquid aluminium. This can then be poured into all kinds of shapes – for example, aeroplane parts, pots or drinks cans.
Numbers games
Did you know that? 💡
Luxury good
Before the extraction of aluminium was optimised in 1859, the price of this metal was higher than the price of gold. The French Emperor Napoleon Bonaparte and other wealthy people therefore preferred to serve dinner to their guests on aluminium dishes rather than gold plates.
I can’t see it!
Normally, we cannot see through aluminium. With transparent aluminium, that’s different. It looks almost exactly like ordinary aluminium, but has a special property: it’s transparent. That’s because it has a special crystal structure that, instead of blocking light, lets it through. Watch this video to find out how it works:
Come with us on a treasure hunt!
This is what it’s all about:
Futurium’s current annual theme “Treasures of the Future” is all about raw materials. To celebrate this theme, we’ve joined forces with Berliner Stadtreinigung to transform selected BSR waste bins into “treasure bins”. With the help of our treasure map, you can discover them throughout the Berlin city area. The QR codes on the treasure bins conceal a total of five different raw-material treasures that need to be collected.
This is how you take part:
1. Open the treasure map here to get the GPS coordinates of all the treasure bins in Berlin or to select a prepared route where you are guaranteed to find all five different treasures.
2. Search for treasure bins in the city and scan the QR codes.
3. Take screenshots of the scanned resource treasures.
4. Collect the complete set of five resource treasures. (Here’s a little spoiler: the fifth treasure can only be discovered at Futurium!)
5. Come to Futurium for even more exciting knowledge about raw materials.
What are you waiting for? Grab your smartphones and off you go! Have fun with the “Treasures of the Future”.