Overview:
Eco-friendly products, from cars to turbines, need the lightweight metal. But it hasn't been good for the planet, or Black neighborhoods.
The economy of the future, as envisioned by environmental activists, will require a lot of aluminum. Everything from solar panels and wind turbines to electric cars and renewable-energy storage systems rely on the metal.
But as a 2023 report from the Environmental Integrity Project called “The Aluminum Paradox” notes, producing the metal in the U.S. is definitely not environmentally friendly.
“The six remaining new aluminum production plants in the U.S., called smelters, are old and use mostly fossil fuel-based electricity,” the report reads. “They have exceeded pollution limits dozens of times in recent years, including for substances that harm health like mercury and copper in water and particulate matter and SO2, in air.”
And as is so often the case with dirty industrial processes, the people living alongside these smelters — especially during the heyday of American aluminum in the 1980s and ‘90s — are Black and brown.
The need for greener aluminum may soon be met thanks to a $6 billion investment announced late last month from the Department of Energy aimed at cleaning up carbon-heavy industries including cement, steel, and paper. Half a billion dollars of those funds is earmarked for Century Aluminum to build the first new primary smelter — which produces new aluminum from raw materials rather than smelting recycled metal — in the U.States.since 1980, which could operate with 75% fewer carbon emissions than a traditional smelter.
The so-called green smelter technology would achieve those cuts through a combination of an energy-efficient design and the use of a clean energy source to power the smelter too. Beyond the vague possibility of it being located somewhere in the Midwest, it’s unclear where the smelter would be built. What is clear is that wherever the smelter ends up, it will need to do better on pollution overall, not just for carbon.
Badin, North Carolina, is the primary example of how bad it can be for people to live alongside an aluminum smelter, particularly if they are Black.
In the 1950s, West Badin was a segregated company town; Alcoa not only owned the plant but many of the houses, schools, and more. In West Badin, the Black side of town, Alcoa workers kept the dust down in unpaved alleyways by spreading PCB-filled oil from the power transformers at the factory.
Known carcinogens, PCBs were later banned in the late 1970s. But their use is symbolic of how Alcoa treated Black people: their homes were the ones closest to the to waste dump, and they worked the most dangerous jobs in the plant, with the most exposure to the toxic chemicals used to manufacture aluminum. While the plant closed in 2007, Badin residents are still fighting Alcoa for a full cleanup.
The six primary aluminum smelters left in the U.S. have all exceeded their permitted emissions for harmful toxins like mercury and sulfur dioxide in recent years. Scrubber systems could drastically reduce the amount of sulfur dioxide emissions from existing smelters, but none have them — and there has been no mention of how a “green smelter” would limit emissions other than carbon.
And without a reduction in pollution across the board, such a new smelter won’t truly be green.