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New Alcoa recycling facility expected to cut energy use in half!
May 23, 2013 - Alcoa announced its $21-million Alcoa Wheel and Transportation Products casthouse expansion at its Barberton, Ohio, plant is expected to cut the total amount of energy used to recycle aluminum for forged wheels in half.
May 23, 2013 By Anthony Capkun
The 50,000-sf recycling facility uses technology to produce wheels from re-melted and scrap aluminum. It is expected to significantly reduce energy use through a combination of process improvements and reduced transportation needs.
The casthouse takes chips and solids from an existing Alcoa wheel machining plant on the same campus—as well as from Alcoa’s Cleveland forging plant—and recycles them into aluminum billets. The billets are then shipped to other wheel-processing facilities to forge into aluminum wheels.
“This new, more energy-efficient facility makes our 100% recyclable aluminum wheels even more environmentally friendly,” said Kevin Anton, Alcoa’s chief sustainability officer. “This project is also part of the Department of Energy’s Better Buildings Challenge, through which we will share best practices—such as linking energy goals to compensation—to help other companies reduce their industrial energy intensity.”
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