At America's last alumina refinery, a trade war spells trade-offs
Trump wants the U.S. to make more aluminum. In Louisiana, home to the only domestic producer of the metal’s key ingredient, some say a ramp-up would take years and worsen pollution.
President Donald Trump wants to reinvigorate American industry with tariffs on metals, cars and dozens of foreign exporters. In Gramercy, Louisiana, home to the nation’s last refiner of the key material for making aluminum, locals aren’t sold on joining any such revival.
“It would be a good thing to go out of business,” Barbara Dumas, 58, said of the plant she’s lived across the river from for 15 years. Like many residents, she bemoans the area’s industrial pollution and believes her community would be better off without the refinery. “It may hurt the people that’s working there, but at least people around here can live safer.”
Atlantic Alumina, also called Atalco, became the last U.S. refinery of its kind after another one 20 miles away closed in 2020. On the banks of the Mississippi River halfway between New Orleans and Baton Rouge, Atalco’s 550 workers crush, wash and heat Jamaican-mined bauxite in a series of solutions. What starts as a rust-colored rock comes out as powdery white aluminum oxide, a compound known as alumina that resembles sugar but whose granules are hard enough to scratch glass.
Vacherie, La., resident Barbara Dumas said she wouldn’t mind seeing the Atalco refinery close for good.Annie Flanagan for NBC NewsThe product is sold to smelters to make “primary” aluminum, the raw material that manufacturers turn into everything from beer cans to plumbing parts. The Atalco plant says it single-handedly supplies about 40% of the alumina used in the United States.
If our company closed, we would be the only point of failure for that entire industry.
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