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 CO2 and perfluorocarbon (PFC) gases, which produce the greenhouse effect, and SO2 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%,