That's partly because the energy needed to produce aluminium from bauxite rock is so huge that major firms have located where renewable power is plentiful and cheap, in places such as Iceland, with its energy from geothermal and hydropower.
The industry also says more than 95% of the aluminium produced is recycled because it's so valuable. But even that requires high temperatures - so, in Dortmund, Germany, they're resurrecting an invention that's more than 100 years old.
It's a machine that takes in aluminium chips, then warms them and compresses them though a sort of giant toothpaste nozzle, to produce a tube of re-formed aluminium - at a fraction of the emissions of normal recycling.
Wherever you look, innovations like this are helping firms reduce emissions. But here's the trouble - the inventions are not being developed nearly fast enough to meet the global goal of almost halving CO2 by 2030.
The biggest problem for all these industries is the shortage of clean electricity from renewable sources to power factories as well as cars and our homes.
Prof Julian Allwood from St Catharine's College, Cambridge, sums it up by saying: "So many of us would like to have a solution based on inventing a new technology. But unfortunately inventing it isn't the problem.
"What matters is the speed at which we can scale things up. You can bring out a new phone and sell it very quickly but you can't bring out a new power station quickly, so the solutions we need have to be fundamentally based on technologies that already exist - and about doing things differently.
"Because these materials [paper, steel, cement, plastic and aluminium] have been made in such high volumes - and have been so cheap - we've used them wastefully."
Prof Allwood says he's optimistic we can still calm climate change - but warns that in future we must find ways of using less material.One wet afternoon in January 2020, Det Con Thomas Grimshaw walked into a budget hotel off a nondescript street in south-east London, with a hunch that it might help him crack a major case.
Det Con Grimshaw asked the receptionist about guests who had stayed there in mid-December. She told him about a group she remembered vividly – one of them had sent her colleague inappropriate messages on the hotel’s out-of-hours iPhone, including a “dick pic”. They saved his number as “Weirdo”.
It was the breakthrough that Det Con Grimshaw was looking for. Finding that phone number helped police identify their first suspect in the biggest domestic burglary in English legal history.t was less than two weeks to Christmas 2019 when Tamara Ecclestone, her husband Jay Rutland and daughter Sophia jetted off to Lapland. The daughter of former Formula 1 supremo Bernie Ecclestone had posted a picture before her departure on InstagramThat night, a gang of thieves would make off from her home in west London’s Kensington Palace Gardens - dubbed “billionaire’s row” - with more than £25m worth of cash and jewellery including diamonds and watches.A security guard at the property discovered three unmasked intruders just after 23:00. They were inside Ecclestone’s dressing room, known as the vault - its six-inch reinforced steel door was not locked.
Who is really behind Britain’s biggest ever burglary? The police, the victims and even the suspects talk for the first time about the £26m series of raids on celebrity homes.
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The intruders fled past him, scattering tinsel and Christmas decorations in their wake. One threw a fire extinguisher as they escaped through a small window with their multimillion-pound haulBritish security services issued an alert earlier this year stating that a UK-based lawyer had been engaged in "political interference activities" for the Chinese state. MI5's public naming of Christine Lee, and a recent unprecedented news conference with the FBI, mark a shift in the approach being taken against the security threat posed by China.
It is not normally good news when an MP is summoned to the office of parliament's director of security. It is worse when officers from MI5 are waiting. That was Labour MP Barry Gardiner's fate on the morning of 13 January.
He was told the meeting was about Christine Lee - a woman he had long considered a close friend. She had donated about half a million pounds to support his work and her son worked in his office. The Speaker of the House of Commons was moments away from issuing an alert.
Gardiner's friend was about to be accused not of being a spy but something more hazy - an agent of influence carrying out "political interference activities on behalf of the Chinese Communist Party".
Lee's friendship with Gardiner had been crucial in smoothing her path into Westminster, where her contacts eventually spread across the political spectrum and to the highest levels. She had met Theresa May and David Cameron and donated to the local party of Ed Davey MP, when the Liberal Democrat leader was secretary of state for energy.
The events that led to 13 January throw a spotlight not just on one woman's path into the highest political circles, but also the changing relationship between the UK and China - and a growing alarm from security officials. At the start of July, the heads of the UK's MI5 and America's FBI made an unprecedented joint appearance in London to publicly warn of the threat from China.
The 13 January conversation was not the first between security officials and Barry Gardiner. Lee's donations had first been highlighted in the media five years earlier. So why was there suddenly a need for such a public alert?
MI5 had gradually received new information suggesting money was flowing into the UK political system with its true origins in China hidden. Specifically, they believed it was linked to the United Front Works Department (UFWD). The UFWD has been referred to by the Chinese Communist Party as a "magic weapon" - not a secret intelligence agency so much as an influence agency. It is one of the organisations that the head of MI5, Ken McCallum, named in his 6 July speech as "mounting patient, well-funded, deceptive campaigns to buy and exert influence".
Even though Gardiner would draw most media attention in the alert's wake - earning him the moniker "Beijing Barry" - the concern for MI5 was not primarily about Christine Lee's links to him. Rather, it was an assessment that China was trying to progress a new generation of political candidates.Christine Lee was involved in a "seeding operation", multiple officials claim, reflecting the way the Chinese state operates - a willingness to wait years for efforts to pay off. Without naming individuals, security sources say there were a handful of candidates across all major parties.
In remarks to journalists after his 6 July speech, the head of MI5 also emphasised this danger:
"It's not always the case of seeking to influence a national leader or someone at cabinet level. One of the things that is very striking is that they are prepared to invest in cultivating people at local level potentially and at the outset of their political career."
US intelligence officials have also warned that local officials are increasingly targeted by China.
By late 2021 this danger - in the case of Christine Lee - was assessed as serious enough that it needed to be disrupted. But how?
"The government and the intelligence agencies have the intelligence tools to identify some of the activities going on," says Lord Evans, a former MI5 head who now chairs the Committee on Standards in Public Life. "But the question is, if you identify those activities, what can you then do about it?"
Over months, officials looked to see if there was enough evidence to prosecute Lee for any crime. But they drew a blank.
That left an alert, publicly naming her as agent of influence.t was only the second of its kind to be issued. The previous summer, a Pole and a Ukrainian had contacted about 100 MPs by email ostensibly to talk about the far-right in Ukraine but really to push policies helpful to Moscow. An alert to warn about their activities received almost no publicity but did lead to dozens of MPs getting in touch with parliamentary security officials for advice.
The alert about Christine Lee would be far more high-profile because her UK roots were much deeper and her role was anything but secret.
Christine Lee arrived from China in 1974 aged 11. She says she experienced verbal bullying at her school in Belfast as the only Chinese person in her class.
She founded her own law firm in 1990 and, from a cramped office in north London, specialised in immigration issues including asylum claims and work visas linked to China. This brought her into contact with the Chinese Embassy, leading to her becoming its legal adviser in 2008. She later became a legal adviser to the Overseas Chinese Affairs Office in Beijing which in 2018 became part of the United Front Works Department. She served on other groups promoting contacts between China and overseas Chinese communities.
Lee, who has not commented publicly, did not respond to requests to speak to the BBC.
In the wake of the alert in January, Barry Gardiner said he had "spoken openly and frankly" with the security services "for a number of years" about his contact with Christine Lee and that he had not been told to stop engaging with her. He had been "totally transparent", he said, about donations made to his office - all of which had been properly declared in the parliamentary Register of Members' Financial Interests.
Martin Thorley from the University of Exeter - who researches Chinese influence - says he became aware of Christine Lee's role more than five years ago. "This wasn't particularly covert. If you could read Chinese you could probably see the linkages on the Chinese side." By 2019, he says he was seeing more reports from China of her contacts with the UFWD. That year she was also pictured with China's leader Xi Jinping.