If a piece of metal rusts before we can protect it or recycle it, do we lose it forever?
Would a piece of metal just rust away to nothing if just left outside?
What is the chemical change from [insert metal] to rust?
In: Chemistry
Yes – *if* you can keep the rust around. Rust is just iron that has combined with oxygen, and if you heat the rust enough, it will break the bonds, release the oxygen, and give you pure molten iron. Straightforward enough. In fact, most of the iron we mine out of the ground comes out as some form of iron oxide – chemically similar to rust.
The problem is that iron oxide (i.e. rust) wears away much more easily than iron. That’s why you can polish or scrub it off of metal. The rust becomes dust in the air or water, which makes it very hard to collect and recycle.
Say you dropped an iron pan into a big aquarium and left it there for a long time. Eventually the whole thing would rust and dissolve into the water. You could boil or filter the water and reclaim the rust particles from it, and then melt that back into iron.
But in the real world, mostly the rust is going to get blown away, washed away, or even intentionally scrubbed away as part of the restoration process.
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