Life cycle Analysis of Aluminum Foil Packaging Material

A fundamental tent of life cycle analysis (LCA) is that every material product must become a waste. To choose the greener products, it is necessary to take into account their environmental impacts from cradle to grave. LCA is the tool used to measure environmental improvements. Aluminum (Al) is the third most common element found in the earth's crust, after oxygen and silicon. Al packaging foil was chosen as the material for the study with its life cycle perspective at Alexandria. The Al packaging produced from virgin and recycled Al was investigated through life cycle stages in these two production processes; primary and secondary. The aim of this study is to evaluate the environmental impact of aluminum packaging process by using life cycle analysis of its product from two different starting raw materials (virgin and recycled aluminum). The input and output materials, energy, water, natural gas consumptions, and solid waste uses in the foil industry had been analyzed in order to identify those with significant contribution to the total environmental impacts. From the survey done on the two life cycles, it was found that in environmental terms, the most important emissions from the primary process are the emission of CO(2) and perfluorocarbon (PFC) gases, which produce the greenhouse effect, and SO(2) as well as the emission of fluorides and polyaromatic hydrocarbons (PAH compounds), which are toxic to humans and the environment. On over all material balance, it was found that the ingot shares by 45% of the feed to the casthouse furnaces at Egyptian Copper Work (ECW), net production of the casthouse is 43.76% and the yield of rotary dross furnace (RDF) is 28.8%. The net production of the foil unit represents 35% of the total input to the unit. By comparing the two life cycles, it is obvious that, for water consumption, 93.5% is used in the primary cycle, while 6.5% is used in the secondary cycle. For electricity consumption, 99.3% is used in the primary cycle; while 0.63% is used in the secondary cycle. For the natural gas consumption, 46.66% is used in the primary cycle excluding Nag' Hammady as it uses fuel oil, while 53.34% is used in the secondary cycle. Using a matrix approach, the primary cycle scored 6 heavy loaded factors out of 9, while the secondary cycle scored 3 heavy loaded factors out of 9. It can be concluded that Al recycling (secondary cycle) in Al industry decreases the use of virgin material, energy use, and environmental loadings, while increasing the economic life of products, and reducing overall material demands. So, the secondary cycle is to be recommended and is the most favorable option in most of the factors influencing the two cycles. Monitoring of the furnaces, automatic control of the metal, proper dross cooling, better refining of molten Al, rate of solidification of molten Al, and proper annealing process will lead to reduction of the overall fuel, water, and electricity consumption and metal losses will be minimum.