Global aluminum rolling and recycling company Novelis has broken ground on a $250m aluminum recycling and casting center at its Nachterstedt plant in Germany.
The center will annually produce 400,000 metric tons of aluminum sheet ingot from recycled material. It will help support the company's drive to increase end-of-life recycling in Europe.
Expected to commission in mid-2014, the Nachterstedt center will process used beverage cans as well as various other forms of aluminum scrap from across continental Europe.
Novelis president and chief executive officer Phil Martens said the investment represents yet another step in delivering on the company's proposal to increase the rolled aluminum sheet's recycled content.
"The advanced sorting, processing and casting capabilities of the new Nachterstedt operation will propel us closer to our goal of 80 percent recycled content by 2020," Martens said.
According to the company, the use of recycled aluminum as input material needs only 5% of the energy used to make primary aluminum from raw materials and helps in keeping away 95% of the greenhouse gases that are associated with production.
Novelis has spent $450m on recycling plants around the world in the last two years, including a $400m facility in Yeongju, South Korea, which was commissioned in October 2012.
With its new projects and others in the pipeline across the world, the company aims to increase its recycling and casting capacity to 2.1 million tons by 2015.
