Sustainable Manufacturing: Au Naturel

Dec. 16, 2006

Alcoa is using plants, soil and microbes to reduce pollutants and cut water discharge.

When Alcoa's new smelter in Iceland becomes operational, most likely in the second or third quarter of 2007, it will benefit from natural sustainable technologies previously employed at the company's smelting operations in Mount Holly, S.C.

It's part of an initiative that Pittsburgh-based Alcoa Inc. developed six years ago and is known as the 2020 Strategic Framework for Sustainability. "What the corporation is doing is allowing me and others in my group to look at innovative ways to move toward water sustainability," explains John Smith, manager of sustainable production technology at the Alcoa Technical Center near Pittsburgh. "We have targets of reducing water use significantly over the next five to 10 years, as well as moving toward zero water discharge."

The keyword is natural. Alcoa is using plants, soil and microbes -- rather than tanks, pumps and mechanical systems -- to reduce the volume of water it discharges as well as to lower the level of pollutants in the discharged water. Alcoa is working with Roux Associates Inc., an Islandia, N.Y.-based environmental management and consulting firm, on natural systems at three locations: Mount Holly, Iceland and Lafayette, Ind.

Natural media filtration cell at Alcoa's Lafayette, Ind., facility.The natural approach at Mount Holly, which is still a work in progress, involves "greening" the smelter's production area with runoff-reducing plants, constructing treatment wetlands to remove contaminants from water and using spray irrigation on grass and a grove of polar trees in an application of phytoremediation technology. Phytoremediation is a passive technology that uses fast-growing trees and plants to deal with environmental contaminants, according to Roux Associates. Even in its pilot stage, the natural approach at Mount Holly has cut process water discharges to the locally owned public water treatment works by 60% to 70%, at a cost "at least" 50% less than conventional technology, says Alcoa.

Meanwhile, at Alcoa's engineered-products plant in Lafayette, Ind., commercially available mushroom compost is being used to remove low levels of PCBs (polychlorinated biphenyl), aluminum, suspended solids, and oil and grease from process and storm water. This natural media filtration system reduced PCB levels to less than 100 parts per trillion from one part per million during its pilot stage, says Alcoa. Now the facility is achieving "non-detect levels" of PCBs as measured by U.S. Environmental Protection Agency methods, the company claims.

Alcoa figures when its natural approach at Lafayette is operating full scale, it will have saved $10 million in up-front capital costs compared with conventional engineered methods, and will save $800,000 to $1 million a year in operating and maintenance costs.

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About the Author

John McClenahen | Former Senior Editor, IndustryWeek

John S. McClenahen, is an occasional essayist on the Web site of IndustryWeek, the executive management publication from which he retired in 2006. He began his journalism career as a broadcast journalist at Westinghouse Broadcasting’s KYW in Cleveland, Ohio. In May 1967, he joined Penton Media Inc. in Cleveland and in September 1967 was transferred to Washington, DC, the base from which for nearly 40 years he wrote primarily about national and international economics and politics, and corporate social responsibility.

      McClenahen, a native of Ohio now residing in Maryland, is an award-winning writer and photographer. He is the author of three books of poetry, most recently An Unexpected Poet (2013), and several books of photographs, including Black, White, and Shades of Grey (2014). He also is the author of a children’s book, Henry at His Beach (2014).

      His photograph “Provincetown: Fog Rising 2004” was selected for the Smithsonian Institution’s 2011 juried exhibition Artists at Work and displayed in the S. Dillon Ripley Center at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C., from June until October 2011. Five of his photographs are in the collection of St. Lawrence University and displayed on campus in Canton, New York.

      John McClenahen’s essay “Incorporating America: Whitman in Context” was designated one of the five best works published in The Journal of Graduate Liberal Studies during the twelve-year editorship of R. Barry Leavis of Rollins College. John McClenahen’s several journalism prizes include the coveted Jesse H. Neal Award. He also is the author of the commemorative poem “Upon 50 Years,” celebrating the fiftieth anniversary of the founding of Wolfson College Cambridge, and appearing in “The Wolfson Review.”

      John McClenahen received a B.A. (English with a minor in government) from St. Lawrence University, an M.A., (English) from Western Reserve University, and a Master of Arts in Liberal Studies from Georgetown University, where he also pursued doctoral studies. At St. Lawrence University, he was elected to academic honor societies in English and government and to Omicron Delta Kappa, the University’s highest undergraduate honor. John McClenahen was a participant in the 32nd Annual Wharton Seminars for Journalists at the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia. During the Easter Term of the 1986 academic year, John McClenahen was the first American to hold a prestigious Press Fellowship at Wolfson College, Cambridge, in the United Kingdom.

      John McClenahen has served on the Editorial Board of Confluence: The Journal of Graduate Liberal Studies and was co-founder and first editor of Liberal Studies at Georgetown. He has been a volunteer researcher on the William Steinway Diary Project at the Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C., and has been an assistant professorial lecturer at The George Washington University in Washington, D.C.