MauryTHINKS

By: Jim Barrie

I realized this past Earth Day that its roots are entwined with those of my life’s work, which began 30 years ago in a little corner of the aluminum recycling industry in Mount Pleasant.

Today, Smelter Service Corp. is recycling some 300 million pounds of aluminum a year, but when we got our start during the same decade as Earth Day, environmentalism was just beginning to make its way into the American vernacular.

Our little recycling business, in essence, was green before green was cool.

Much of the aluminum that our country consumed 30 years ago was being put into our landfills, and still is to some degree. We can further alter that if each of us will consciously recycle aluminum cans and products instead of throwing them away. Aluminum made from aluminum cans, instead of virgin bauxite, produces about half the emissions. If we could recover and recycle 75 percent of the aluminum cans now going into U.S. landfills — about 600,000 metric tons annually — we could reduce enough energy consumption to keep nearly 12 million metric tons of carbon dioxide from being generated and released into the atmosphere.

This is a huge factor in the growth of the recycled aluminum market, especially when you consider aluminum can be reused in the same form over and over again. It’s more economical, faster and more energy-efficient to recycle aluminum than ever. At issue is what to do with the waste, or salt slag, that recycling itself generates.

Continuing to put that waste into our landfills is an unsustainable solution, so we’re working with the state of Tennessee, the recycling industry and local and regional leaders to develop a long-range plan that is environmentally and economically beneficial.

One of the most promising solutions involves partnering with European companies that are already finding great success using advanced technologies to recycle salt slag. Energy costs associated with recycling salt slag have been one of the top obstacles to salt-slag recycling in the U.S. Such a partnership would put Tennessee on the map as the first in the nation to develop an economically viable solution.

The vision includes a single-site, total recycling system that produces usable byproducts and dramatically reduces — and ultimately eliminates — the need to landfill. It’s a vision that brings with it an initial investment of more than $40 million and an annual regional economic impact in excess of $30 million. That’s based on savings from fuel costs, energy conservation, land-use reclamation and more than 50 new, high-tech, high-paying jobs.

Thirty years bring a lot of perspective. And while much of our future success in aluminum recycling in Tennessee and the U.S. relies on doing things differently, we have to continue to focus on the things that have helped make us great. Sustainability means continuing to protect nature’s resources, empowering employees to create even greater efficiencies and solve problems, and building community by giving back and investing in it. It’s our history and our future.

Jim Barrier is CEO of Smelter Service Corp.