The company can handle more than 6 million pounds of scrap aluminum each month, which arrives from as far away as Russia. Workers heat the scrap to 1,100 degrees Fahrenheit, skim off impurities, and pour the resulting metal into molds. What's left are 25-pound ingots used to manufacture car transmissions, aluminum cones and smaller pellets needed to make steel. Paints, oils and other additives burn off in the process. By law, the vapors must be passed through an air filtration system.
Residents charge that unfiltered emissions are regularly escaping the plant.
Melting aluminum typically produces chlorine, hydrogen chloride and hydrogen fluoride, all of which pose health hazards and are supposed to be strictly regulated. Continental says that residents are mistaking occasional nuisances for actual hazards. Aluminum recyclers aren't usually located in pretty little pristine towns across the street from a golf course. There's a lack of education about what's going on here. Our goal is to be the cleanest and greenest plant in the aluminum industry.