Aluminium rolling and recycling company Speira will be investing EUR40 million (USD46.7m) in more recycling capacity at the Rheinwerk mill at Neuss, near Düsseldorf.
The company said it is focusing on reducing its carbon footprint and the EUR40m investment will be part of CO2 savings of 1.5 million tonnes per year.
A new melting furnace for scrap aluminium was delivered and is being installed, and production set to start in early 2026. Speira is also converting the four casting plants for recycled alloys, with the third under way.
Scrap storage areas are complete and cover a third of the decommissioned smelter. This will be supplemented by a facility to sample the incoming scrap.
“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,” said Boris Kurth, head of BU Can at Speira and head at Rheinwerk. “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 utilise much more.”
The company said the new recycling furnace will melt aluminium alloys for rolling into sheet for use in making beverage cans. The plant is ready for used aluminium cans to pass through the recycling facilities many times a year, which Speira said will enable “the ecological advantages of state-of-the-art technology to be exploited particularly frequently and efficiently”.
The company pointed out these efforts will help support the recycling rate for beverage cans across Europe. Speira said: “Under the umbrella of the European Aluminium association, the company is working with other manufacturers to research recycling-friendly alloys and promote deposit, return and collection systems for this valuable light metal.”
Volker Backs, managing director of Speira, commented: “Speira has moved away from energy-intensive primary production. 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.”
Local MP Daniel Rinkert, who is also deputy spokesperson for Climate and Environment in the SPD parliamentary group, visited the plant to see the transformation, and added: “Speira is demonstrating how the transformation can succeed with new economic impetus. 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.”
Speira has 11 recycling and production sites in Germany and Norway, recycling up to 650,000 tonnes of aluminium a year. The company produces around one million tonnes of advanced rolled products for industries including automotive, packaging, printing, engineering, building and construction.
