Alcoa sets ambitious recycling goal
Projects aluminum can recycling at 75% by 2015
Alcoa announced that it has established a goal to raise
the industry’s used beverage can (UBC) recycling rate in North America
from its current 52% rate to 75% by 2015.
In the United States aluminum beverage can market of
over 1.5 million metric tons per year, about 800,000 tons of UBCs are
currently being recycled. Greg Wittbecker, Alcoa’s director of corporate
metal recycling strategy, said that the United States recycling rate
has fallen steadily from its high of 68% in 1992. In comparison, Brazil
and Japan report phenomenal recycling rates of nearly 95% and 92%, respectively,
and the global average is 60%.
Wittbecker cited several reasons why recycling has fallen in North America,
including inconvenient collection systems, technology stagnation in coated
scrap processing and commercial objectives that have not been aligned
If 75% of UBCs not currently recycled in North America are brought back
into the system that equates to about 600,000 metric tons of aluminum,
Wittbecker explained. That 600,000 metric tons is equal to a savings
of 1,286 megawatts of electricity, or the equivalent of two average-sized
coal power plants running at maximum efficiency 24/7.
Alcoa recently began a $22 million investment to expand recycling capacity
at its Tennessee operations by nearly 50 percent. The expansion will
utilize state-of-the-art environmental and fuel efficiency technologies
and support future flexibility to process other aluminum scrap types.
Wittbecker outlined a number of possible approaches to help increase
the recycling rate, including behavior changes, making recycling and
collection more convenient, technical improvements for processing coated
materials and enhanced commercial alliances across all in the industry.