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Water
We recognize that the consumption of freshwater from various community, industrial, and agricultural interests is an issue reaching a critical condition in many areas, and numerous companies are just now beginning to realize the need for a sustainable water management strategy that Alcoa recognized in 2000. At that time, we set long-term objectives to reduce our process water requirements.
Reducing the use of freshwater in our operations will make more available to meet the other needs of the communities in which we operate and reduce the volume of wastewater to be discharged or managed under ever-increasing regulatory requirements.
Our goal of a 60% reduction in water use by 2009 and 70% by 2010 from a base year of 2000 remains a challenge. We continued to improve in 2007, increasing our reduction to 26%.
Water is most significantly used in our refining and ingot casting operations. While our refineries in Western Australia attempt to capture and reuse as much water as possible, we are evaluating methods to capture water (and heat) lost through evaporation in production. For our casting operations, we continue to explore innovative and more efficient recycling applications.
We are also re-evaluating quality requirements to assess the validity of using secondary sources of water in our processes. This will reduce both the need to extract freshwater and discharge water to the environment, giving us time to explore process changes that might lead to reduced water demand overall.
We continue to improve the quality of our wastewater and are striving to reduce the volume discharged. Our long-term goal is to reach zero discharge of process water by 2020. In some refineries, like those in Western Australia and Jamaica, we have achieved this goal.
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