With the recent change of government in the UK, it seems like a good time to look ahead. With this in mind, the recent announcement of a £69M investment to expand the recycling capacity for used beverage cans (UBCs) at our Warrington plant in the UK, represents real progress for our UK business and the community it serves.
But if we look back, aluminium production and recycling has a long history in Warrington dating all the way back to the 1940s. Since that time, a constant flow of innovation and development has seen the plant move from the production of aluminium powders, billets and since 1991 the production of can body sheet ingots – essentially large slabs of aluminium made from recycled drink cans ready for rolling back into the material to make aluminium cans once again.
But even since 1991 things have changed. At that time with an aluminium can recycling rate of just 2% and no kerbside collections, some actions were needed. The company (then Alcan) invested in a ‘Cash for Cans’ collection system setting up collection centres in major cities to pay collectors (mainly charities) 1p per can for an aluminium can. The challenge at that time was that only 50% of drink cans were made with aluminium, the rest being steel whereas today 100% of UK drink cans are aluminium. Fast forward to the 00s and with the growth of local authority collections, investment in MRFs etc, change was needed once more and at Novelis we offered a guaranteed (published) weekly price for collected UBC to provide transparency to the market. And whilst this approach has continued until today, except that we no longer publish our own price, nothing seems too similar between the times when the recycling rate was 2% and today when its hovering around the 80% mark. I guess that’s evolution for you.
What does all this innovation and change tell us, well to confirm that familiar refrain that ‘nothing is as constant as change.’ And yet further changes lay ahead as Mary Creagh the newly appointed DEFRA Minister responsible for circular economy confirmed that they were “working to…….determine the next steps for the DRS.”
The Warrington plant and the UK resource economy has come a long way over the years, and is now poised for another step change. The expansion project involves constructing a new dross house, three new bag houses, and installing advanced shredding, sorting, de-coating, and melting technologies. These upgrades will not only boost the plant’s recycling volume and efficiency, but also result in an annual CO2e reduction of more than 350,000 tonnes.
So according to Alupro - our industry association, with over twelve billion aluminium drink cans placed on to the UK market every year, our project aims to collect that material and create a local, fully circular system that will avoid the need to export scrap from the UK. And that does feel like quite some progress since the 1990s!
