Novelis completes $48m expansion of New York recycling facility

Aluminium reprocessing company Novelis has completed its $48-million (£32 million) upgrade of its automotive scrap aluminium recycling facility in Oswego, New York.

The investment includes a new 81,000 square-foot building capable of processing, sorting and storing automotive scrap aluminium. Built in response to the escalating demand for aluminium sheet from American car manufacturers (which Novelis estimates will increase by more than 30 per cent per year ‘through the end of the decade’), the recycling centre will enable Novelis to process as much as 10,000 metric tonnes of recycled scrap per month.

Car manufacturer Ford has already committed to using Novelis aluminium in its new F-150 pickup truck model and has also agreed to a closed-loop recycling system to reduce its carbon footprint. The partnership will see any scrap aluminium left over from the car manufacturer’s stamping process collected and returned to Novelis’s Oswego facility to be recycled into usable metal for auto parts such as hoods and doors. As aluminium is an infinitely recyclable material, it is hoped that the majority of scrap material collected will be recycled and used, reducing waste.

‘Increasing economic efficiencies for customers’

Marco Palmieri, Senior Vice President of Novelis and President of Novelis North America, commented: “As the leader in automotive closed-loop recycling, one of our top priorities is to create a sustainable supply line between Novelis and automakers, which will preserve the [aluminium’s] value, reduce greenhouse gases and increase economic efficiencies for our customers. This investment will help us meet new demands of automakers as they turn towards lightweight [aluminium] to create more fuel-efficient vehicles.”  

The investment also covered infrastructure improvements such as road and parking upgrades to handle increased lorry traffic.

Since 2011, Novelis has invested more than $550 million (£362 million) to raise its global automotive sheet capacity to 900,000 metric tonnes by the end of this year, and hired more than 430 new employees, with around 250 additional jobs planned by the year 2020.

Find out more about Novelis’s automotive investments.