Hydro Aluminium is continuing to expand its recycling business and is taking over WMR Recycling GmbH (WMR) in Dormagen. The agreement was signed between the managing partners of WMR, Boris and Gregor Kurth, and Roland Scharf-Bergmann, head of recycling activities in the Primary Metal business division of Hydro. “The WMR plant has the most modern waste-sorting technology in the world, and we now own the patent rights to that technology,” explains Roland Scharf-Bergmann. The takeover still needs the approval of the cartel authorities and is anticipated to be completed at the beginning of April.
Hydro has been working with the former owners of WMR since 2013 in the form of a reprocessing agreement, in which multiple recycling plants of Hydro are supplied with sorted and shredded scrap from various sources and products. “Our experience with the plant is very positive,” reports Scharf-Bergmann. Using X-ray transmission or other sorting technologies 36,000 tonnes of aluminium can be processed annually in the WMR plant. The plant in Dormagen will supply shredded and sorted recycled materials to Hydro’s recycling plants in Europe. The recycled materials are produced from old aluminium scrap. Hydro’s new plant for recycling used beverage cans, the construction of which is presently being prepared in Neuss, nearby Dormagen, utilizes several elements from the WMR plant’s technology, optimized to recycle used beverage cans in a closed loop recycling solution.
In future the efficient sorting of scrap will become increasingly important in the aluminium industry, according to Roland Scharf-Bergmann. “In order to be capable of producing the alloys which our customers need, we have to have full control over the composition of the input materials, which we feed to the melting furnaces. For this reason the development and use of efficient scrap sorting technology for our recycling business is immensely important,” says Scharf-Bergmann. “Only when we succeed in efficiently sorting the scrap can we begin to exploit the positive recycling properties of aluminium to their full extent.”