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Material Use & Recycling—Programs & Actions
Alcoa Business System
Alcoa's fundamental approach for efficiently using materials is the Alcoa Business System (ABS). This system provides the most efficient way for eliminating and preventing waste by enabling us to supply customers, on demand, with defect-free products at the lowest cost and with the highest degree of safety.
Waste Materials Used
Our primary approach to waste management is to reduce waste generation where possible. If waste generation is not preventable, we attempt to reuse the waste or make it practical for others to use. Similarly, we explore opportunities to use waste materials as raw materials in our processes where technically and economically feasible.
In the last few years, we have been a leader in finding ways to transform spent pot lining (SPL)—the carbon and refractory lining of aluminum smelting pots that have reached the end of their service life—into a raw material for other industries. We worked with cement manufacturers to develop an environmentally safe process that destroys the spent pot lining's cyanide content, reduces the leachable fluoride to acceptable levels, and absorbs other contaminants into the cement material. An added bonus is that the carbon contained in the spent pot lining creates heat during the cement-making process, lowering the amount of energy needed for manufacturing and offering a significant cost and environmental benefit.
In 2006, we led a taskforce that developed a global voluntary objective, adopted by the board of the International Aluminium Institute, to ultimately convert all generated SPL as feedstock for other industries or to re-use and/or process all SPL in our facilities.
We also use what is essentially a waste product from the petroleum refining industry—petroleum coke—as a raw material to form the anodes that are essential for our electrolytic process. We also purchase coal tar pitch, a by-product of the steel industry, as the binder for our anodes. We believe that these forms of "industrial ecology" are an important component of a sustainable business economy.
We continue to evaluate alternative uses for bauxite residue from our refining operations, and we're advancing the Alcoa-developed process of neutralizing this material with carbon dioxide. This award-winning process, developed in Australia, has the double benefit of improving the characteristics of the residue for re-use while sequestering a greenhouse gas.
Recycled metal from products like used beverage cans, end-of-life vehicles, demolished buildings, and discarded consumer products continues to be an important source for our basic material, and its importance will keep growing. In 2007, we purchased and recycled 938,000 tons of aluminum scrap. This is slightly lower than the volume captured in 2006, primarily due to some availability issues in Europe.
Performance data
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Recycling
Aluminum is one of the few materials used in consumer products that can be economically recycled without local, regional, or national subsidies. For example, recycling rates for aluminum beverage cans exceed 80% in many countries, including Brazil, Switzerland, Japan, and Sweden. In the United States, the aluminum can recycling rate—the number of cans recycled divided by the number of cans shipped from U.S. can makers to beverage fillers—has been as high as 66%, but now stands just over 50%. Of the 100 billion aluminum cans sold each year in the United States, approximately 51 billion are collected and remelted to make new cans. Similarly, aluminum in automobiles, buildings, and electrical systems are recycled at rates near 90%.
Since aluminum can be recycled so efficiently, it's a "manufactured resource." Once the aluminum is separated from the oxide in the bauxite, it can be used over and over again by us and by future generations.
The current "standing inventory" of this manufactured resource is about 583 million metric tons of aluminum in use and available for future recycling. This represents about 73% of all the aluminum that has ever been produced.
We operate one of the largest used beverage (UBC) can recycling facilities in the world at our plant near Knoxville, Tennessee, USA, and we currently are upgrading this facility to increase its recycling capacity by 50%. The expansion will utilize state-of-the-art environmental and fuel efficiency technologies, and it will support future flexibility to process other aluminum scrap types. This investment furthers our position as a leader in aluminum scrap processing technology.
All recycled metal from the cans recycled at the Knoxville plant is returned directly to the can sheet manufactured at the adjacent rolling mill and is converted again to beverage cans. We operate similar but smaller facilities in other countries.
In early 2008, we announced an aggressive goal to raise the UBC recycling rate in North America from its current 52% rate to 75% by 2015. We outlined a number of possible approaches to help increase the recycling rate, including behavior changes, making recycling and collection more convenient, technical improvements for improving the processing of coated materials, and improved commercial alliances across all in the industry.
We believe that the aluminum industry must work together for common sustainability goals that transcend individual commercial objectives, and we must approach this with a sense of urgency. We need to recapture this pool of energy before it is lost to the landfill.
By raising the recycling rate to 75%, the industry can save the electricity equivalent of two average-size coal-fired power plants and avoid more than 11 million metric tons of carbon dioxide emissions a year.
To help us achieve this goal, we created the position of director of corporate metal recycling strategy in 2007. We also launched in March 2008 a recycling website detailing how aluminum recycling is part of the clean air solution.
Performance data
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Case Studies
Students Dig Deep to Put Classroom Learnings into Action
Plastic Packaging Replaces Oil with Corn
Greening of the Supply Chain
Using One Process Waste to Neutralize Another
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