Product Stewardship
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Overview
Product stewardship involves accounting for the impacts associated with products across their entire life cycle, including use and disposal. Although of most relevance at the product design stage, it increasingly informs actions at all stages of industrial production, as more purchasers factor such impacts into their supplier-selection criteria.
Since aluminum is one of the world’s most recyclable products, its disposal at the end of an application’s life cycle involves recycling it into secondary metal for other applications. This is why aluminum’s life cycle is referred to as “cradle to cradle” rather than “cradle to grave.”
Primary aluminum production facilities address product stewardship – and reduce the life cycle impacts associated with product use – primarily by focusing on resource-use efficiency. Smelters are also responding to customers’ increasingly stringent expectations regarding product quality.
Strategies and Initiatives
Various initiatives described elsewhere in this report are designed to improve the efficiency with which key inputs such as energy, alumina and coke are used in the manufacture of primary aluminum. (See, in particular, “Energy” and “Environmental Releases”.)
Individuals and departments at Rio Tinto Alcan Primary Metal BC are encouraged to identify more specific opportunities, which sometimes translate into efficiencies that measurably reduce operating costs and the footprint associated with products.
During 2007, for example, reduction employee Gilbert (Poun) Levesque (pictured above) was recognized for having leveraged the potential, presented by more flexibly configured welding equipment, for increased re-use of portions of studs. The steel-use reductions that resulted created a one-time savings of $1.1 million and ongoing savings of $100,000 annually.
Collective efforts continued in 2007 to keep pace with evolving customer expectations with respect to both product and service-related attributes.
Assessments conducted during 2007 laid the basis for the use of recently opened container shipping facilities at the nearby Port of Prince Rupert in early 2008. Among other benefits, containerized shipping creates the opportunity for increased shipment frequency and may become a basis for reduced packaging requirements.
