No Waste for Energy-Saving Aluminum

October 13, 2002 – Vol.7 No.29

NO-WASTE FOR ENERGY-SAVING ALUMINUM.

One way to make vehicles more fuel efficient is to make them lighter. Light, but strong, aluminum can replace steel in automobiles without sacrificing safety. And the energy savings of aluminum go even further. Aluminum can be recycled indefinitely, and recycling aluminum uses only 5 percent of the energy needed to extract primary aluminum from ore.

But aluminum is sold as alloys, each for a different purpose with different qualities, different properties. One kind makes good beer cans, another good airplane wings, another the hood of a car or truck. To maintain those properties, only like alloys can be recycled (melted down and reformed into sheet or extruded products) together. But once aluminum alloys are made into products it’s difficult to tell them apart later on when the product reaches the end of its useful life. It’s not as if they have a bar code or stamp on them.

But with careful attention, and eventually some additional technology, it is possible to separate like alloys. Ford and Alcan have begun doing just that. The two have launched the first North American closed-loop recycling of aluminum auto body sheet metal. In the process scraps from the cutting of sheet aluminum alloy (AA6111) into hoods for a number of Ford vehicles are separated from other scrap at a stamping facility and returned to an Alcan recycling facility. The AA611 scraps are remelted and rerolled back into aluminum sheet and sent back to the same stamping plant. What previously would have been waste is now back on the production line.

Ford spent nearly $400,000 for modifications to an existing separation process to develop the clean scrap process. And this is just the first step. Alcan, Ford and others are developing technologies that use lasers to identify aluminum alloys for easy separation and recycling. Visit Alcan at http://www.alcan.com/