The January 16 issue of Recycling Today features a discussion with Alcoa's Chief Sustainability Officer Kevin Anton about Alcoa's investment in Electronic Recyclers International (ERI) and the importance of electronics recycling.
Here's an excerpt:
Recycling has long been a part of Alcoa's history as well as that of the aluminum industry's in general. ... The importance of recycling to Alcoa's business has prompted the company to invest in many initiatives in the last year, including taking a stake in Fresno, Calif.-based Electronic Recycling International (ERI), upgrading its Tennessee can reclamation facility, constructing a new facility in Ohio to recycle truck wheels and constructing new recycling furnaces in Spain.
"We are putting capital in the ground to be able to increase our usage of scrap and, at the same time, taking efforts to increase the supply side of scrap, particularly the can. It is pretty fundamental to who we are," Anton says.
Recycling Today: Alcoa took a stake in ERI in 2011. What made the company an attractive investment? What does Alcoa hope to gain through its relationship with ERI?
Anton: If you think about consumer electronics, you often have products that have life cycles of less than two years. You start to think, "How can the world allow products that are so prolific and that have such a short life cycle and not have a proper end-of-life solution for them?" We see consumer electronics as being a great growth market for aluminum because of the recyclability, plus the attributes that aluminum brings to the product. It's got great consumer appeal through the look and the feel, but also the thermal properties of aluminum help the designers manufacture the product smaller, thinner, lighter, and the heat dissipation properties of aluminum help the designers manage the heat from the circuitry. It is a real win-win.
Just like when we helped establish the market for the aluminum can—we are the leader in that market—we recognized that there was a need to create closed-loop recycling and get the cans recovered, and we built the infrastructure to do that. The analogy here is that we are helping establish the infrastructure to bring that aluminum back in a closed loop and make sure it doesn't go into landfills.
As we started looking in this space, we wanted to find a company that on a values basis and in terms of growth ambitions lined up with Alcoa. I met John Shegerian at ERI and immediately there was a mix of cultures and a mix of values. We saw a successful entrepreneur who had the ability to grow his business exponentially and we saw that Alcoa could help him do that.
ERI, the nation's largest recycler of electronic waste, opened a regional recycling center in Badin, NC last year that will create up to 200 jobs. The company began operations in 2011 and will move into a newly renovated and much larger facility at the Badin Business Park this spring.
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