Aluminum is something that shows up throughout your everyday life. Three uses for aluminum include canning beverages, roofing homes, and electronic parts. It can also be used in support beams for various structures. An aluminum framing system is strong but lightweight. This makes it a popular choice for many builders. So if you’re considering working with aluminum, you might buy your products pre-made and ready to work with. Or you might decide to start from scratch. You buy an aluminum block, then shape the metal into whatever you need it to become.

Since aluminum is so widely used, it can be a good investment opportunity. Before investing, check the aluminum price forecast on a trusted financial resource. This will help give you a clear idea of what to expect after you buy shares in an aluminum company. From there, find the best place to buy aluminum stock and invest according to advice from an expert. If you’re smart and patient in your approach, you could make a lot of money. Aluminum is popular and affordable, so it is a lucrative field.

The aluminum business is good, and it’s treating Tom Click and Patriot Aluminum Products quite well. Click, president and CEO of Patriot Aluminum, recently moved the company into its newly-constructed 30,000-square-foot production facility in Louisa County, VA at the end of May.

“Business has been very good, and it’s nice that we were able to make the move and the transition without any kind of disruption.” Click says. “It’s kind of like moving your house, if you had a 30,000-square-foot house. We still have a lot of things in boxes.”

Patriot Aluminum manufactures rigid aluminum conduit. “Our products are aimed at infrastructure markets,” Click says. “This is not a bubble-type market. Much of our product is used in wastewater treatment plants, chemical facilities, pharmaceutical facilities, dairy farms…it’s basically driven by industries that grown with the population, so it’s a slow growth, but it’s a consistent market.

In the United States, the aluminum industry manufactures about $40 billion in products each year. Aluminum’s biggest market has traditionally been the automotive industry, but it is also heavily used for building and construction and packaging. Other uses include electrical products, household cooking products, and sports and recreation equipment.

Aluminum is the second-most-used metal after steel, largely because it is so versatile. One of the biggest benefits of steel is its high strength to weight ratio. Aluminum provides the strength of heavier materials like steel, while maintaining the weight of cheaper materials such as plywood or plastic. Aluminum is a rigid material that doesn’t require ribs, gussets, or bosses for strength.

But its lightness does not mean that aluminum is not a durable material. It resists warping, cracking, and bending, absorbs shock and impact, and resists both temperature and water damage. It is easily modified and customized, quick-to-market, and easily fabricated and assembled. Perhaps most importantly, aluminum can be recycled infinitely with no degradation in properties.

Aluminum is the most abundant mineral in the earth’s crust, though it does not typically appear in its pure form in nature. Aluminum is derived from bauxite, a mineral mined in several parts of the world, and it was not until 1888 that an economically feasible process was developed for the commercial production of aluminum.

As for Tom Click, he has no plans to step away from Patriot Aluminum, and is positioning the company for long-term growth. “Patriot’s value proposition is really based around service and quality. The product doesn’t cost any more, but it’s the best quality and the best service level, and we’re still the only American-owned-and-operated family business which is producing the full line of aluminum conduit products. Those things really do set us apart from our competitors.”