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Comment by mannykannot | Hacker News Reader

I'm surprised the guardrails are aluminum rather than galvanized steel.

They're intended to save lives by slowing down a car careening out of control or bouncing it out of oncoming traffic at least.

Galvanized steel would increase the hazard by having a higher likelihood of piercing through the shell of the vehicle and striking the passengers than the softer and more bendy aluminum would. It also corrodes over time, so barring an accident aluminum despite its higher initial cost is a better choice of material for guardrails.

Tradeoff is that they would need to make the fines for recyclers so onerous that they would knowingly never accept guardrail material since the only truly effective deterrent is removing the profit motive.

Galvanized steel is used the world over. It's a simple engineering exercise to interchange one for the other.

Steel has some superior properties with regard to tearing/bending so you can actually make "softer" barriers out of it if that's what you're going for.

Aluminum also has some long term corrosion benefits over galvanized steel especially in the context sometimes where they are attached to treated wooden posts. They use isolation these days but still not enough usually.

Yeah, I’m rather surprised rather they’re AL.

Related: I recently had a few hundred lbs of clean galvanized steel to dispose of and looked into selling to scrap yard. I would have spent more on gas, one way, taking it up there than I’d have gotten for it. Luckily my local recycling yard (2-3mi away) was happy to take it for free. Ironically, I also took a few half-full trash bags of AL cans and got ~$35 for them.

The cans are artificially inflated by the deposit fee at the cash register when you buy them.

so more deposit than recycling for metal.

In a state with no road salt to speak of no less.

I'd be interested to see what the alleged reason for this is.

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