Gaia company produces first ‘near zero-emissions’ recycled aluminium
Hydro Extrusion Avintes, a company in the municipality of Vila Nova de Gaia, south of Porto, has produced its first batch of recycled aluminium with almost “zero polluting emissions” and using post-consumer scrap as its raw material, it was announced on Tuesday.
In a statement, the company – part of Norway’s Norsk Hydro group – explains that the new product was created 100% from scrap recovered from products at the end of their useful life and considered “carbon neutral” since it is reused from, for example, windows, cars or bicycles, and can be reused an “infinit [number of] times.”
Using this raw material consumes only 5% of the energy used to produce primary aluminium, that is, in its purest form, from mined alloys.
With applications in different sectors of activity, such as the automotive industry, construction, transport, energy and electronics, aluminium is one of the “most widely used metals in the world”.
Quoted in the statement, the head of Hydro Avintes’s recycling unit, João Nina, explains that this first batch, entitled Hydro Recycled Low Carbon, is produced “without the addition of process scrap (pre-consumer) or primary aluminium.
“We can consider that its carbon footprint is almost zero, less than 0.5 kilograms of carbon dioxide per kilogram of aluminium,” he explained.
Rui Abreu, the company’s metal and die manager for Iberia, also points out that this is a milestone in “offering more sustainable aluminium solutions with a lower carbon footprint, which in turn will improve the environmental impact of our customers’ products.”
The company also points out that this is “another step in its sustainability strategy” – after its factory in Navarra, Spain, used green hydrogen “for the first time” to produce recycled aluminium in 2023.
Dedicated to providing aluminium solutions for sectors such as transport, automotive and construction, Hydro Extrusion has a presence in Portugal and Spain, and employs more than 500 people in both countries.
