Along the mostly white Mediterranean landscapes from Spain to Greece, there are colourful patches of rock with a red-pink-purple-ochre-brown spectrum. This rock is called Bauxite, named after a small town in southern France called Les Beaux-de-Provence. It means beautiful or handsome in French.
90 percent of Bauxite is used for making alumina, which is largely used to produce aluminium. The other 10 percent is put toward a variety of uses such as abrasives, water purification, and refining kerosene. But of course, aluminium permeates our lives, from the aluminium foil we use to preserve leftovers to the canned beverages we might enjoy with those leftovers to the airplanes we travel in to visit family. Aluminium, though artificially made, is possible because of those colourful Mediterranean rocks