Speira is investing €40 million in additional recycling capacity at its Rheinwerk facility in Neuss, Germany. The project includes the installation of a new melting furnace exclusively for scrap, which is currently being installed. The furnace will primarily focus on recycling scrap for the beverage can market.
At the same time, the third of four existing casting plants is being converted and optimized for recycled alloys. In this way, the Rheinwerk is further reducing its ecological footprint, with the aim of achieving total CO2 savings of up to 1.5 million tonnes per year.
Transitioning the Facility
The Rheinwerk facility was formerly a primary aluminum smelter with 300 m long halls. The former smelter used enormous amounts of energy during its production. However, the electrolysis furnaces had disappeared — replaced by partition walls for storage of aluminum scrap. This is representative of the company’s concrete change from a linear to a circular business model.
“Speira has moved away from energy-intensive primary production,” explained Volker Backs, managing director of Speira. “This decision was inevitable in light of Germany’s energy policy outlook and our responsibility for the future viability of our entire company. And our transformation into a pure recycling group — a path we began over 20 years ago — has been accelerated once again.”
The new scrap storage facility is already complete, covering a third of the decommissioned smelter. This will be further supplemented by facilities for sampling incoming scrap, which will feed Speira’s new and existing recycling furnaces.
“The long halls allowed us to think and plan big. This huge new scrap storage facility creates space for more input for all our recycling furnaces — not just the new one,” says Boris Kurth, head of BU Can at Speira and head of the Rheinwerk facility. “We need the sampling for scrap that has already gone through one life cycle. These post-consumer scraps are a source that we want to utilize much more.”
Speira’s expanding of scrap storage and recycling capacity is in line with its goals to develop the Rhine plant into Europe’s leading recycling hub. “Speira is demonstrating how the transformation can succeed with new economic impetus,” noted Daniel Rinkert, member of the German Parliament and deputy spokesperson for Climate and Environment in the SPD parliamentary group, when he visited the plant. “The SPD’s task is to support companies in this process. Reliability and predictability are crucial here. We will therefore continue to speed up the planning and approval processes and ensure that there are no price jumps in emissions trading that could stifle the transformation.”
Beverage Can Circularity
The new recycling furnace will then melt aluminum alloys that are processed into rolling ingot for beverage cans. Speira noted that it can demonstrate its own sustainability ambitions particularly well in this market — because beverage cans are a very fast-moving product.
The life cycle of a beverage can — from production to filling, retail sale, consumption by the end user, disposal, and recycling — lasts only around 60 days. This means that the same aluminum cans pass through Speira’s recycling facilities many times a year, allowing the ecological advantages of the company’s state-of-the-art technology to be exploited particularly frequently and efficiently.
This short life cycle is a key reason why Speira is committed to continuously improving the recycling rate for beverage cans. Under the umbrella of European Aluminium, the company is working with other manufacturers to research recycling-friendly alloys and promote deposit, return, and collection systems for this valuable light metal.