South Pacific RBU
We are working on pioneering an environmental project in Western Australia. Essentially, it involves turning one plant’s environmental challenge into another plant’s opportunity.
In cooperation with aluminium manufacturer Alcoa and the chemicals company CSBP, Australia’s largest supplier of fertiliser, BOC Australia is investing in the infrastructure for safe storage of carbon dioxide (CO2).
The greenhouse gas is generated during ammonia (NH3) production at the CSBP plant in Kwinana, south of Perth. It is first pipelined to the nearby BOC site, where it is treated and purified. It is then pumped to Alcoa’s waste processing plant through a pipeline and injected into the bauxite residue from aluminium production.
This decreases the material’s alkalinity (pH) levels and permanently binds the CO2. This process significantly reduces waste storage risks by reducing the pH of the bauxite residue to naturally occurring levels.
This means that the residue can be recycled and used for a variety of purposes, including road-laying and agriculture. At the same time, the CO2 that would otherwise be emitted by CSBP never enters the atmosphere and so does not contribute to the greenhouse effect. This permanently reduces CO2 emissions by 180 tonnes each day, 70,000 tonnes a year.
Sulphur hexafluoride (SF6) is a non-toxic, non-combustible and nearly inert specialty gas, mainly used as a filler gas for insulated window glazing and in the electronics and semiconductor industries, but it is also a particularly harmful greenhouse gas.
Its global warming potential is around 22,000 times that of carbon dioxide. SF6 gas cylinders returned by customers are usually not entirely empty and could not previously be processed in Australia due to a lack of appropriate facilities, but that has all changed.
In September 2006, BOC imported a complete SF6 recovery plant from the USA and has since been able to process all returned SF6 cylinders on-site in Australia, recovering the gas at 99.9 percent purity and redistributing it.
This not only recycles a residual product in high demand, but also helps prevent this particularly harmful gas from entering the atmosphere.
Our in-house environmental charter in Australia puts the spotlight on water management. Examples of successful initiatives in this area include:
Reducing of process water consumption by a third
Installing of a rainwater tank with pipeline system to meet internal water requirements on site (e.g. washrooms)
Watering surrounding garden areas with accumulated wastewater
Installing a truck wash bay using recycled water
Reducing water consumption by twenty percent through plumbing modifications and improving the irrigation system
Lowering energy consumption by optimising night-time site lighting
Africa RBU
Supply bottlenecks in South Africa have prompted the government to call on all large industrial companies to cut energy consumption by ten percent.
To meet this target, Afrox has appointed an Energy Efficiency Officer, responsible for planning and developing energy projects. We have also run energy audits at our larger locations.
These initiatives focus on operational efficiencies and improved maintenance on production facilities. In addition, we have benchmarked electricity prices across all locations to explore different cost-cutting measures.
