Can Aluminum Really Go Green?

Alcoa and Rio Tinto —with a push from Apple—are trying to clean up production of one of the dirtiest metals

- By Joe Deaux

As David DeYoung, then a director of business technologies at Alcoa, walked into Apple’s Cupertino, Calif., headquarters in September 2015, he knew that the stakes were high. DeYoung led a group of engineers who’d spent decades pursuing the holy grail for the notoriously dirty aluminum industry: a way to smelt the metal without producing any direct carbon emissions. Apple Inc., which Harbor Intelligence analyst Jorge Vazquez estimates uses almost 15,000 metric tons of aluminum annually for its electronics gear, had invited DeYoung to explain a potentially revolutionary carbonless manufacturing process for aluminum that his group was developing.

Alcoa Inc. was on the verge of ending the DeYoung team’s years-long search. To make the tension even worse, moments before DeYoung stepped into a roundtable with Apple engineers, he received word Alcoa was splitting into two publicly traded companies—casting another cloud on his unit’s project. So Apple’s interest in reducing the carbon footprint of its metal casings looked to be key to saving the funding.