Share, , Google Plus, Pinterest,

Posted in:

Novelis Focuses on Recycling and Low Emissions with New Sustainability Strategy

Headshot of a man in a suit with a black coat and crisp white shirt against a pale grey background.
Figure 1. Emilio Braghi.

Novelis Inc. is a leader in the production of flat rolled aluminum products and is considered to be the world’s largest recycler of aluminum. Recently, the company announced its new 3×30 sustainability strategy, through which the company will continue its efforts to build a circular economy by partnering both with its suppliers, as well as its global customers in automotive, beverage packaging, and other industries. During the ALUMINIUM show in Düsseldorf, Germany, in October, Light Metal Age spoke with Emilio Braghi (Figure 1), executive vice president, Novelis Inc. and president, Novelis Europe, about the company’s new sustainability strategy and its focus on “shaping a sustainable world together.”

Early Focus on Recycling

Novelis was formed in 2005, when the company spun off from Alcan, and became a subsidiary of Hindalco Industries Limited in 2007. From its early days, Novelis has been focused on recycling as a key priority of its organization, with the aim of reducing its overall carbon footprint. In 2011, the company launched an initiative to achieve 80% recycled content across all of its products by 2020 — a very ambitious target at the time. This ambition led to significant investments in aluminum recycling around the world, which made the company the world leader in aluminum recycling that it is today.

“Now it’s pretty easy to see that this was a wise move,” said Braghi. “But I remember at the time, when we were announcing our huge investments in recycling, the industry and our competitors were quite skeptical. But that skepticism has changed, and now the industry knows that recycling is very important in a world that is becoming more and more circular. Especially in Europe, we see a strong push for circularity coming from policymakers, as well as from consumers.”

Although Novelis has not yet hit its 80% target across all of its products, the company has nevertheless made meaningful progress. “We were at around 30% recycled content when we announced our investments in recycling, and now we have exceeded 60% as a company,” noted Braghi. “We have almost doubled the recycled content of our products over the past 12 years, which is great progress. To increase recycled content, it was not only a question of investing in capacity, but also required a combination of activities, which included finding the scrap to recycle, developing new alloys, and convincing our customers to buy alloys with a high-recycled content.

“We were able to work all these levers and achieve significant progress. Novelis has developed high-recycled content alloys for basically every market, from can to automotive, to specialties. The beauty of this is that our customers are not seeing any difference in quality in our high recycled content alloys compared to prime-based alloys. This is important, because it also allows aluminum to compete with other materials. For example, steel has not yet shown the capability to have high-recycled content, while keeping the high quality requirement.”

New Sustainability Strategy

Novelis announced its new 3×30 sustainability strategy in September 2024, with a new set of ambitious, carbon-related goals to accelerate the company’s decarbonization and circularity efforts. The plan builds on the company’s previous achievements — such as its significant increase in recycled content and  27% reduction in carbon emissions in fiscal year 2024 from its 2016 baseline — and includes three primary objectives that the company aims to reach by the end of 2030.

First, the company plans to further increase the average recycled content of its products to 75% (from the current 63%) by 2030. “That was the driver that launched this strategy,” explained Braghi. “Every region in which Novelis operates has its own specific target, which will all converge into 75%. For example, South America is already above that level, because our business in South America is mostly based on beverage cans, which already have a high recycled content. But in other areas, compared to where we are now, this is going to be a huge increase in the next six years, from 2024 to 2030.”

Second, Novelis plans to become the lowest-emissions, flat-rolled products aluminum manufacturer, with a carbon footprint of less than 3 t CO2e/t Al for all of its shipped flat rolled products. “The fact that we are targeting a high recycled content means that we are bringing a low-carbon solution,” noted Braghi. “But we want to also make sure that the prime that we need to use is mostly a low-carbon prime solution, so that once we combine our scrap content with prime, we are offering a total package in terms of carbon footprint. This is very competitive, because many industries are requiring more and more low-carbon footprint products.”

Third, the company aims to continue investing in projects that lead the aluminum industry toward circularity. “One area is investing in more recycling capacity, but there are two other big buckets,” said Braghi. “We need to make sure that we are sourcing the scrap we need to increase our recycled content. We also need to be developing alloys with high-recycled content, which requires a good partnership with our key customers in the market.”

Braghi noted that maintaining the company’s world class manufacturing, with its high efficiency, safety, and data collection, is also key to the 3×30 strategy. “We have developed our Novelis operating system, which is very important in order to make sure we have a efficient production performance,” he said. “This allows us to be competitive in the market in terms of cost per ton.”

In line with these strategies, Novelis is investing in major expansion projects in the U.S. and Europe. One of the company’s major projects is its $4.1 billion recycling and rolling plant in Bay Minette, AL, which will be the first integrated rolling facility to be built in the U.S. in 40 years. The plant will have an initial capacity to produce 600,000 tonnes of finished aluminum goods per year, which will be focused on the beverage container market, with flexibility for automotive production. In addition, the site will include a recycling center for beverage cans, increasing the company’s recycling capacity by 15 billion cans per year when fully operational.

Novelis broke ground on the Bay Minette facility in October 2022 and is in the process of preparing the site and constructing buildings (Figure 2-3) — with the expectation to begin commissioning the plant in the second half of 2026. Selection of equipment for the facility is underway. For example, Danieli will supply a 1+4 hot-strip mill, a continuous coating line for high-speed paint applications, and a high-speed trimming line with advanced automation for the project.

Rendering of several buildings forming a future facility.
Figure 2. A rendering of the Bay Minette plant.
Aerial view of a factory building under construction surrounded by raw ground works with a dirt pit for the future casting area.
Figure 3. Construction work on the new casting pit at Bay Minette.

Novelis also signed a contract with Alabama Power, a subsidiary of Southern Company, for the supply of renewable energy via two new 80 MW solar power generation plants being constructed in Alabama. This contract will cover over half of the Bay Minette facility’s renewable energy needs while avoiding 192,000 tons of CO2 emissions per year, thus contributing to the reduction of the site’s Scope 1 and 2 greenhouse gas emissions (as per the GHG Protocol).

“Progress on Bay Minette has been excellent over the past few months, and it is moving at a good pace,” said Braghi. “Obviously, it’s complex building a fully integrated greenfield plant, but we believe that this is really a great investment for our future in the U.S. Right now, there is a lack of capacity in the U.S., so it is still reliant on imports. The U.S. market needs more domestic capacity.”

Another major project is occurring in the U.K., where Novelis is investing approximately $90 million to increase recycling capacity at its Latchford plant. The project will include the installation of state-of-the-art shredding, sorting, decoating, and melting technologies, as well as the construction of a new dross house and three new bag houses. Once completed in December 2026, the expansion project will enable the plant to recycle an additional 85,000 tonnes per year of used beverage cans (UBCs), equaling a growth of more than 100%. The facility will be able to recycle 100% of the UBCs to be collected under the future U.K. deposit return scheme (DRS), creating a local, fully circular system that will avoid the need to export scrap from the U.K. It will also result in an annual carbon reduction of more than 350,000 tonnes for Novelis Europe.

“Latchford is a huge investment for a brownfield expansion project,” explained Braghi. “It will allow us not only to increase capacity, but also increase the absorption of UBC scrap into that plant. The U.K. market has been growing in terms of can production lines, and we have seen many of our customers investing in the U.K. market. So, it’s important for us to develop local recycling capacity, because we will see more and more UBC being generated there. Also, the new DRS starting up in the U.K. will boost the recycling rate in the region.”

Automotive End-of-Life Recycling

Novelis is well known for its closed-loop recycling programs with automotive OEMs, in which aluminum process scrap from automotive factories, press shops, and stamping operations is sorted and returned to the company for recycling into new automotive body sheet. However, as Novelis pointed out in a recent blog post, there is a significant opportunity to recapture aluminum from vehicles at the end of their life.

“When we look at the end-of-life for vehicles, the industry is trying to recover various materials that are part of the car, which is a space that is not well organized yet,” noted Braghi. “There is the growing interest from the OEMs to develop recycling solutions for end-of-life vehicles. We have already developed several high-recycled content alloys for automotive flat-rolled products. That work has been done, and some OEMs have completed the qualification cycle with promising results, but there is more work to be done.”

According to Novelis, it is vital that all players in the automotive supply chain come together to make cost-effective recapture of high-value, end-of-life automotive aluminum a reality. Increased collaboration across the supply chain is essential in order to implement a number of aspects of this automotive dismantling paradigm, which could include capturing and segregating aluminum from end-of-life vehicles before they are crushed and mixed into twitch (scrap that combines a wide range of aluminum types and alloys), as well as sorting twitch using optical identification and AI-based sensor technologies for better scrap segregation to minimize downcycling. Another aspect of this paradigm includes creating uni-alloy designs for hoods, door panels, and other closures that simplify sorting and recycling. Novelis noted that all players — from automotive OEMs to aluminum companies and technology suppliers — will benefit from these initiatives.

One such industry collaboration was announced at the ALUMINIUM show (Figure 3). Novelis signed a three-year strategic agreement with TSR Recycling GmbH & Co. KG, a part of the REMONDIS Group, which will ensure reliable supply of approximately 75,000 tonnes of end-of-life aluminum scrap for the production of low-carbon automotive aluminum sheet. TSR has 170 business locations across Europe and processes 7.2 million tonnes of ferrous and non-ferrous metals every year into high-quality recycled raw materials for various industries. This agreement directly supports the rising market demand for high-recycled-content aluminum in the automotive market.

Two men in suits stand shaking hands in a conference hall.
Figure 3. Denis Reuter, COO of TSR Group, and Emilio Braghi, Novelis, shake hands after the signing ceremony between the two companies at ALUMINIUM.

“TSR is a big recycling group,” said Braghi. “A lot of their recycling process basically takes vehicles at the end of their life — separating some parts, dismantling others, and then, through sophisticated sorting techniques, they are going to supply us shredded scrap coming from end-of-life vehicles. So, this is a very important announcement, because it is the first big project in the industry, where you see materials coming from vehicles at the end of their life being recycled into new automotive sheet.”

A Fully Circular Aluminum Industry

The push for circularity is occurring across a range of industries. Over the last two years, Novelis has been working to lower the carbon impact of packaging materials through collaborations with beverage can and other packaging companies, including recent can sheet supply agreements with Ball Corp., The Coca-Cola Company, and Ardagh Metal Packaging. In addition, Novelis worked with Beiersdorf, a German manufacturer of personal-care products, to create an eco-friendly version of the Nivea Creme tin. The new tin was launched in 2024 with 80% recycled aluminum.

“Obviously, the packaging industry is very keen on developing sustainable products,” said Braghi. “The beverage can has historically been moving in the direction of high-recycled content. We also have important developments for a uni-alloy system, which basically would involve producing a can body and end with the same alloy to increase the recyclability and recycled content in that area.”

Braghi also pointed to growing interest in building and construction, for which Novelis has been developing high-recycled-content alloys. For example, the company entered into a partnership with VELUX Group at the end of 2022 to supply flat-rolled aluminum with a recycled content of around 70% for use in windows. The aim is to reach a carbon footprint below 4.0 kg CO2e/kg Al.

“This is a transition which is basically happening everywhere — from packaging to building and construction, beverage can, and automotive,” said Braghi. “One area we still need to work on a bit is aerospace, which is traditionally an industry that requires a long-term qualification process, measuring not in months, but more in the number of years. So, it’s a very delicate industry, which will require some more time to adapt circularity. But even there, we are confident we are going to implement that transition.”

Novelis considers its focus on low-carbon products and supporting the development of a circular economy to be more than just a sustainability strategy. “It’s our core strategy. Novelis wants to be the leading supplier of low-carbon aluminum solutions,” emphasized Braghi. “Although we’re competing with our peers in the aluminum industry, we also hope that our strategy will bring all aluminum companies into the same circular space. As an aluminum industry, we are moving forward and offering a sustainable range of products, which are competitive with other materials in the same applications.”


Editor’s Note: This article first appeared in the December 2024 issue of Light Metal Age. To receive the current issue, please subscribe.

Share, , Google Plus, Pinterest,