Aluminium Recycling: An Interview With John Gardner

John Gardner, chief sustainability officer for Novelis, talks to azocleantech.com about the increase in aluminium recycling and how recycled aluminium can be used in the beverage and automotive industries. GT: Could you please give a brief overview of Novelis?

JG: Novelis is the world’s largest aluminium rolled products company. We’re supplying sheet and coil aluminium for lots of interesting brands and products that we use in our everyday lives. For example, we sell a lot of aluminium into packaging, so your soft drink or beer can is made out of our aluminium!
We are also supplying a lot of aluminium to the car industry. Aluminium is very light, strong and highly recyclable. It is very good for the car industry because they are doing their best to reduce greenhouse gases and optimise fuel economy.
They’re doing their best to lightweight their cars and they are working very closely with us on that. There were about 5 million cars supplied last year which contain aluminium supplied by Novelis and that’s growing year over year.

GT: What percentage of the rolled aluminium that you produce comes from recycled material?

JG: Overall globally we’re at 39% and our intention is to get to 80% by the year 2020.

GT: in your opinion, is enough being done globally to recycle aluminium cans?

JG: We are very encouraged that recycling is growing year on year. About 70% of aluminum cans consumed globally are already recycled. This makes aluminium the most recycled beverage container material, and that has been growing steadily over the last 10 years. This is due to a big effort on working with education, as well as the infrastructure to make sure that we have the capacity to do this.

GT: What are some of the other important sustainability targets that Novelis is working towards?

JG: We’ve got 10 major targets across the different areas of sustainability, covering the economics, the environmental impact of the business and also the social impact.

On the environmental side, we have total greenhouse gas emissions, which we are trying to half by 2020.

We’ve got an energy intensity target, which is trying to reduce our energy intensity by 39% by 2020. We’ve already made good progress on this, and have made 19% improvement in the last two years.

We’ve got a target on our water usage, so we are trying to reduce water usage by 25% by 2020. We are also aiming to reduce waste going into landfill to zero.

GT: Sustainability is of course important in an environmental sense – how important is it in a business sense?

JG: Very important! We try and balance business decisions by looking at all sides of sustainability. Our view of life is that sustainability is vital to our long-term business. We clearly need to make money in the long run, and we see sustainability in terms of what products we should be supplying, what products society wants, and what products we can add value to.

So obviously sustainability has good environmental benefits, but we also see it as good business sense.

GT: Your Annual Sustainability Report shows great progress within the company-could you tell us a little bit more about this please?

JG: Yes, we are very happy with the progress we have made recently. Here are some of the key statistics:

• Recycling increased from 33 to 39% over the last year
• In the last 2 years we have had 19% improvement on energy consumption
• 11% improvement on water use
• 7% reduction in greenhouse gases
• 18% improvement in landfill reduction
GT: What are the sustainability targets for Novelis in the future? How do you see the aluminium industry progressing over the next 10 years?

JG: We see some strong growth potential for aluminium in the coming years and this is largely driven by sustainability factors…We are just setting up our first manufacturing plant in China which will initially be serving the automotive market. China is a very interesting place for sustainability and especially for aluminium.

Obviously the economy is growing very quickly, and the Chinese are very aware of the need for future thinking about energy, emissions and recycling. What we can do by making sustainable, low carbon recyclable products they are very excited by.