Air quality

Overview

As a socially and environmentally responsible company, we are very conscious that our mining processes can cause pollutants to enter the atmosphere.  We also understand that some of these emissions may be harmful to people, animals and plant life, and not only in the areas in which we operate. 

So we have programmes in place to help mitigate these effects and also to meet our legal requirements in this area.

How we improve air quality

Our main challenges come from greenhouse gases mainly in the form of carbon dioxide produced from burning fossil fuels, clearing land and some industrial processes. But we also emit dust from stockpiling or moving material, oxides of sulphur (SOx) and fluoride from smelters and oxides of nitrogen (NOx) from burning fuels.
Our aim is to continually work at putting controls in place to minimise any health or environmental impacts from our emissions into the air. We monitor health in the workplace and have also developed Groupwide occupational health standards that cover such topics as monitoring workplace particulate gas and vapour exposure.

Our results

Go to the SOx, NOx, fluorides and dust pages to see our performance on these issues.

Within Alcan, technology has led to reductions in air emissions over the last ten years. However decreasing raw material quality has made it difficult to improve on this performance. Alcan is undertaking a comprehensive review of its raw material supply as well as addressing this challenge through research and development.

We also carry out extensive and comprehensive public reporting to a number of bodies including:

• The Toxic Release Inventory in the US
• The National Pollutant Inventory in Australia
• The National Pollutant Release Inventory in Canada