This fully-fledged facility will increase the recycling capacity of this production site, which was established in 1967, by 75%. The company will thus be able to process an additional 130,000 tonnes of used aluminium cans and production scraps from the automotive industry per year to remake new products of equal quality. The coils produced by the rolling mill on the same site (whose capacity remains stable at 450,000 tonnes) will increase to an average content of 75% recycled aluminium (compared to 40% previously).
The equivalent of 20 billion cans per year
Alongside its lightness, aluminium’s ability to be reused infinitely (at least in theory) makes it a strategic material, recognised as such by the European Commission, recalls Jean-Marc Germain. The project was also able to benefit from an accelerated and simplified authorisation procedure, as well as €10 million in subsidies from the France Relance plan out of a total amount of €130 million. The investment also allows the creation of around a hundred jobs on the site, which has 1,600. In total, the plant located on the banks of the Rhine can recycle 290,000 tonnes of aluminium per year, the equivalent of 20 billion cans!
In the brand new plant, two melting furnaces are a reminder of the complexities of closed-loop recycling. Because of the specific alloys required for each application, “You have to make a can out of a can. You can’t mix“, underlines the plant manager, Willem Loué. Each tool is therefore specialized. The first furnace operates continuously with a mixture of gas and pure oxygen, which reduces fossil fuel consumption by 30%. It is dedicated to packaging. The cans are first stripped of all paint and varnish by passing for about fifteen minutes in a rotating tube whose temperature, around 400°C, burns the organic materials and leaves only the bare metal. They are then immersed in the furnace: a bath of about twenty tons of molten metal.
The second, much larger furnace also runs on gas. It is equipped with regenerative burners and operates in batches, melting 110 tons of aluminum each time. Not far away, a gigantic loader allows large quantities of aluminum of all shapes to be loaded very quickly into the furnace.
Once melted, the aluminium is sent to hot-holding furnaces. It is then filtered and poured into vertical moving-floor moulds to form thick 13-tonne plates. These will be rolled in the existing Neuf-Brisach plant to form the coils required by car body repairers and packaging producers.
Increase the rate of recycled raw materials
«The project allows us to increase the rate of recycled aluminum in our products“, underlines Willem Loué. He estimates that thanks to these new capacities, 60% of the 450,000 tonnes of aluminium coils produced in Neuf-Brisach each year will come from external scrap and waste. For the rest, 30 to 35% will come from offcuts produced within the plant and only 5 to 10% will be made up of primary aluminium that is never recycled. The latter is still needed to adjust the aluminium alloys in the furnaces or as a supplement for the rolling plant.
For Constellium, boosting recycling makes it possible to offer products with a very low carbon footprint. A tonne of recycled aluminium in Neuf-Brisach requires 0.5 tonnes of CO2, whereas primary aluminium production, which is extremely electricity-intensive, fluctuates between 2 and 5 tonnes of CO2 per tonne depending on the processes and the origin of the energy used. Including these incorporated emissions, the industrialist estimates that the carbon footprint of the Neuf-Brisach site will decrease by 400,000 tonnes of CO2 despite its increased gas consumption. Thanks to a closed-loop cooling water reuse system, the site’s water consumption will only increase by 1%.
French cans still too poorly sorted
«The demand for aluminum for cans or automobiles is growing. On the one hand, for reasons of weight reduction, to save energy or to make electric vehicles that go further. On the other hand, because the world wants to reduce pollution, visible and invisible, from plastic, which is less recyclable and recycled where recycling aluminum makes economic sense.” lists Jean-Marc Germain to L’Usine Nouvelle. To be able to recycle more, the new Constellium center has its own sorting facilities, which is a new feature. They crush the cans and then remove the pieces of plastic and iron as well as the many cigarette butts found among the metal shavings, underlines the CEO of Constellium.
«We can recycle bales of lower quality cans, with more contaminants, which are partly found in France“, assures the industrialist, recalling that France is distinguished by its poor performance in recycling light metal. No miracle, however. Even with these new machines, the Neuf-Brisach plant (which buys used cans in 500-kilo bales from Poland, Germany or Scandinavia) will have a hard time truly tackling French waste, points out Willem Loué. “The selective sorting that we have in France is insufficient, we find many impurities, often including aluminum packaging or car rims, which do not allow cans to be remade.“, regrets the engineer, who spent 30 years in the sector. An echo of an old request from Constellium, which advocates for the implementation of a deposit on beverage cans in order to increase both their collection and the quality of sorting. A proposal put forward once again by Jean-Marc Germain, but the implementation of which would deprive sorting centers of valuable revenue.
Source: www.usinenouvelle.com
