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Many Shades of Green

While you may not know it, metalcasting is leading the green movement. Think about it. We are one of the world’s original recyclers.

Metalcasting brings new life to discarded metal from cars, appliances and other manufacturing processes by remelting it to make a new engineered cast metal component. The term scrap metal is so common in metalcasting that we fail to think of the significance of this process. Estimates report that U.S. metalcasters remelt more than 5 million tons of scrap metal each year.

Today, metalcasting also finds new life for one of our largest waste streams—used metalcasting sand. Beyond recycling it through the metalcasting process countless times until its strength has been exhausted, our industry is currently finding reuse applications for 2.6 million tons (almost 33%) of our spent metalcasting sand in asphalt, concrete, construction, flowable fill and horticultural applications. This product used to be fodder for landfills.

Sure, we need to do a lot more to reduce our emissions levels and energy consumption, and globally our standards must be higher. But we can’t forget about the green foundation we have already established.  This is powerful information in support of the green movement in manufacturing.