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Alcoa - Aluminum Recycling Facility

  • Cast house melting furnace foundation 
  • Interior cast house construction 
  • External cast house construction 

Aluminum Recycling Facility

Showcase Project: Alcoa, Inc.

Location

Barberton, OH

Project Size

50,000 Square Feet

Financial Overview

Project Cost $21 million

Annual Energy Use (Source EUI)

Baseline
1
Expected
(2013)
0.75
Actual
COMING SOON

Expected
Energy Savings:

25%

Annual Energy Cost

Baseline
1
Expected
(2013)
0.75
Actual
COMING SOON

Expected
Savings:

25%

Baseline point of comparison is a similar facility operated by Alcoa.

Background

Alcoa is expanding its Barberton production plant to include a new 50,000 square foot recycling facility that uses a novel technology to reduce energy use by 25 percent relative to comparable, existing plants. In addition to the process improvements, co-location of the recycling plant with an existing production facility dramatically reduces trucking needs, leading to a cut in transportation related energy use of about 90 percent. As a result of this project, Alcoa will use about half as much energy to produce and distribute recycled aluminum as it did before the plant was built.

Solutions

Alcoa's new recycling facility is the first of its kind in North America. It uses advanced technology to reduce the energy use and costs to produce wheels from re-melted and scrap aluminum. Construction of the facility was completed in October 2012, and first production began soon after. Alcoa is ramping up production and expects to be at full capacity in spring of 2013. The facility will process 100% recycled material.

Other Benefits

In addition to improving the energy efficiency of the manufacturing process and providing more eco-friendly products such as lighter-weight wheels, the Barberton, OH investment will also create 30 full-time manufacturing jobs and help protect more than 350 existing positions.

Cast house construction

Background

Alcoa's Barberton, OH facility produces finished truck and auto wheels that are forged at the company's Cleveland, OH plant. The new recycling facility will take chips and solids from the forging and machining operations of both the Cleveland and Barberton plants and convert them back into aluminum billets—large cylinders of aluminum, which are subsequently processed into intermediate or final products. The newly cast billet will be shipped to Alcoa wheel processing facilities for forging into wheels.

Energy savings will be achieved through process improvements and reduced transportation needs. Overall, energy reductions of approximately 50% are expected, system-wide, with energy savings split roughly equally between process improvements in the plant and transportation reductions. Specifically, the recycling process at the new facility itself is approximately 25% more efficient than a comparable, existing plant. Plus, the recycling facility's location puts it much closer to facilities that both provide raw materials for the recycling process and use the finished, recycled material. The previous practice was to ship scrap material to another Alcoa facility located much farther away. With construction of the recycling plant in Barberton, OH, Alcoa will effectively be replacing an 800 mile trip with a 60 mile trip. This results in an approximate 90% reduction in transportation energy.

Solutions

The recycling facility itself is expected to be significantly more energy efficient than comparable plants. But this project achieves additional energy savings in at least three other important ways. First, because scrap aluminum is currently sent from Barberton to other facilities for recycling, the construction of a recycling facility on-site reduces transit needs. This cuts energy use and greenhouse gas emissions, while saving the company time and money.

Second, producing aluminum from recycled materials is typically about 95% more energy efficient than making it from virgin materials. It requires only 5% of the energy to re-melt aluminum as it does to create it from bauxite (aluminum ore). Finally, aluminum wheels are approximately 45% lighter than steel, which can lead to significant energy savings—about 1,000 gallons of fuel per year, according to Alcoa.

Other Benefits