Stronger collection, sorting and quality standards can enable European aluminium scrap to return to high-value applications

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In this exclusive AL Circle interview, Emilio Braghi shares Novelis’ perspective on why aluminium scrap is becoming one of Europe’s most strategic industrial resources and what must change to keep more value within the region.

Appointed as Chief Operating Officer in January 2026, Braghi is responsible for driving operational performance across Novelis and advancing excellence in safety, quality and reliability to world-class standards. He also continues to serve as the President of Novelis Europe, a role he has held since September 2016, overseeing 10 manufacturing facilities that produce and recycle aluminium for industries including automotive, aerospace, beverage packaging and construction.

With this deep operational view of Europe’s aluminium value chain, Braghi reflects on the forces reshaping the region’s circular economy. The conversation moves across scrap retention, automotive circularity, recycled-content aluminium, CBAM, low-carbon production and cleaner logistics, raising some of the most pressing questions around Europe’s recycling future. The interview also highlights how Novelis is approaching the shift from ambitious pilot projects to scalable industry models while balancing competitiveness, carbon reduction and supply-chain resilience. 

For a deeper view of Europe’s aluminium recycling market, read the full interview below with Emilio Braghi. 

AL Circle: Publicly available data indicates that Europe exports around 1.2 million tonnes of aluminium scrap annually, even as parts of its furnace capacity remain underutilised. What policy and industry actions are required to establish a balanced scrap management framework that retains more material within Europe while avoiding disruption to global trade flows?

Emilio Braghi: Europe has a strong opportunity to build a more circular and competitive aluminium value chain. This requires a scrap management framework that treats aluminium scrap as a strategic resource, not simply as waste. Publicly available data and industry reporting show that significant volumes of aluminium scrap continue to leave Europe each year, while parts of the region’s recycling capacity remain underutilised. For a company like Novelis, which has invested significantly in recycling capacity and high-recycled-content aluminium solutions in Europe, the priority is to ensure that valuable scrap can be collected, sorted and reused where it delivers the greatest circularity and climate benefit.

A fair system should first ensure sufficient and reliable access to scrap for European recyclers. Today, market distortions and unfair trade practices in third countries make it increasingly difficult for European industry to secure scrap on competitive terms, despite strong domestic collection. Addressing this imbalance is critical to enable existing recycling capacity to operate efficiently and to provide the certainty needed for further investment in Europe’s industrial recycling ecosystem.

In this context, we call for the swift introduction of a fee on all exports of aluminium scrap out of Europe. This is necessary to re-establish a level playing field, correct market distortions, and ensure that scrap remains available for European production, decarbonisation, and investment in new recycling capacity. The objective is not to restrict global trade, but to ensure that it takes place under fair and balanced conditions, aligned with Europe’s climate and industrial ambitions.

Beyond this, Europe needs stronger collection, sorting and quality standards so that more aluminium scrap can be returned to high-value applications instead of being downcycled or exported without sufficient transparency. Improving traceability is equally important to better understand scrap flows, ensure accountability across the value chain, and guarantee that exported material is processed under equivalent environmental standards.

Industry also has a clear role to play. Aluminium producers, recyclers, customers, dismantlers and waste-management partners need to collaborate more closely to improve scrap streams, increase alloy separation and keep more material in closed-loop systems. This is particularly important in sectors such as automotive, packaging and building and construction, where aluminium can be recycled repeatedly without losing its inherent properties. Novelis’ circularity approach is based on exactly this principle: keeping aluminium in use for as long as possible and increasing recycled content across its product portfolio.

AL Circle: Novelis has produced aluminium coils made from 100 per cent recycled end-of-life automotive scrap for the European automotive market. What are the next steps to scale this from a pilot achievement to a commercial model, especially in collection, dismantling, sorting, alloy separation and automaker participation?

Emilio Braghi: The production of an aluminium coil made from 100 per cent recycled end-of-life automotive scrap was an important proof point: it demonstrated that high levels of recycled content can be achieved while still meeting demanding automotive requirements, including surface quality and formability for car body outer skin applications. The next step is to move from technical feasibility pilots to a scalable value-chain model.

Scaling this approach highly depends on improving access to consistent, high-quality end-of-life automotive scrap. This requires closer collaboration across the automotive recycling value chain, from dismantlers and scrap processors to material platforms, recyclers, aluminium producers and automakers. The Automotive Circularity Platform, which Novelis initiated together with thyssenkrupp Materials Services, is one example of how access to high-quality end-of-life material can be streamlined by digitalising the market for secondary materials, improving supply-chain efficiency and maximising material recovery from vehicles at the end of the consumer-use cycle. 

A second priority is improved dismantling, sorting and alloy separation. This means advancing scrap sortation and segregation operations, developing alloys that can accept higher scrap content, and supporting design-for-disassembly approaches such as single-alloy designs for closures. 

Automaker participation is equally critical. Novelis already supplies automakers with aluminium products made with up to 85 per cent recycled content, enabled by customer collaboration, closed-loop recycling systems for post-production scrap and partnerships with recyclable-material suppliers. To commercialise higher levels of end-of-life recycled content, automakers will need to integrate circularity earlier into vehicle design, specify higher recycled-content materials where technically appropriate, and work with suppliers to create reliable take-back and material recovery pathways. 

In practical terms, the commercial model will require a combination of reliable scrap sourcing, quality assurance, alloy-specific separation, scalable recycling infrastructure, and long-term customer demand. The goal is not only to increase recycled content but also to keep high-value automotive aluminium in high-value automotive applications for as long as possible, helping reduce reliance on primary material and supporting a more circular automotive sector.

AL Circle: With aluminium scrap prices rising alongside primary aluminium prices, how is this changing the economics of recycled aluminium production? Do higher scrap costs risk narrowing the cost advantage of recycled aluminium, or can energy savings and lower carbon intensity still protect its competitiveness?

Emilio Braghi: Rising scrap prices are changing the economics of recycled aluminium, but they do not change the fundamental value proposition of aluminium recycling. As demand for low-carbon materials increases and more companies seek access to high-quality scrap, scrap is becoming a more strategic and therefore more valuable resource. This can narrow the purely material-cost advantage of recycled aluminium in some markets, particularly where clean, alloy-specific scrap is scarce or where competition for scrap is high.

At the same time, recycled aluminium continues to offer clear environmental advantages. Producing aluminium from recycled material requires around 95 per cent less energy than primary aluminium production, with significantly lower associated carbon emissions. 

For Novelis, competitiveness therefore cannot be assessed on scrap price alone. It depends on the full value chain: secure access to quality scrap, efficient collection and sorting, advanced recycling technologies, high metal recovery, proximity to customers, closed-loop systems and the ability to deliver products with a lower carbon footprint. 

So, recycled aluminium remains highly competitive when its full benefits are considered: lower energy intensity, lower carbon footprint, improved resource security and stronger alignment with customer decarbonisation goals. 

Read all the latest developments in Europe’s aluminium recycling industry: Click here

AL Circle: CBAM currently creates different cost implications for primary, recycled and scrap-based aluminium products. From Novelis’ perspective, how should CBAM treat recycled aluminium and scrap-based imports so that it supports circularity without creating loopholes, unfair cost advantages or resource shuffling?

Emilio Braghi: The EU CBAM was designed to raise the carbon cost of imports. In practice, for aluminium, it leads to a general increase in metal input costs across the European market, for both imported and domestically produced aluminium, via its impact on the regional market premium.

As ETS free allowances are phased out for European primary aluminium producers and CBAM is phased in for imported primary aluminium, this price effect will intensify. By contrast, non-European producers can avoid much of this cost because they source metal inputs outside Europe, mostly without embedded carbon costs, and pay CBAM only on the products they export to the EU. They can further reduce CBAM exposure through material reshuffling and extensive use of scrap. The result is an uneven playing field. 

We support the European aluminium industry’s recommendation for CBAM to be calculated based on default values, with the same default value to apply independently of the scrap content, without distinction between pre- and post-consumer scrap. The legislator must recognise that CBAM will not level the playing field simply by attributing emissions to pre-consumer scrap.

Differentiating between pre- and post-consumer scrap would actively undermine closed-loop recycling systems, discouraging investments in high-quality recycling both in Europe and globally. This runs counter to the EU’s circular economy and decarbonisation objectives.

Instead, the systematic application of default values to imports for the purpose of CBAM calculation – provided this is done in a way that does not disadvantage one type of scrap over another – can help level the playing field for domestic producers, while avoiding contributing to the complexity and inconsistencies in carbon accounting practices that would ultimately undermine circularity.

AL Circle: Novelis has commissioned an electric pusher furnace at its Sierre plant in Switzerland, replacing a natural gas-fired system. What were the most important technical and operational challenges in this transition, particularly around energy supply, heating performance, product quality, process control and integration with rolling operations?

Emilio Braghi: The commissioning of the electric pusher furnace at Novelis’ Sierre plant is an important milestone in our transition toward lower-carbon aluminium production. The furnace is used to heat aluminium ingots before rolling, and that replacing the former natural gas-fired system with an electric solution based on the local Swiss power mix is expected to reduce annual emissions by approximately 4,500 tonnes of CO₂e and lower overall energy consumption by around 25%.

From an operational perspective, the key priority was to integrate the new technology into an existing rolling process while maintaining reliable heating performance, process stability, and product quality. A transition of this kind is not simply about changing the energy source; it must also meet the requirements of day-to-day production and downstream rolling operations.

The project is also closely linked to the broader Net Zero Lab Valais initiative, launched with OIKEN, HES-SO Valais-Wallis and EPFL to develop carbon-neutral solutions for aluminium manufacturing. 

AL Circle: Novelis has signed a strategic rail logistics contract to strengthen its European freight network, estimating that rail can save around 78 per cent CO₂e emissions compared with road transport. What share of Novelis’ annual carbon footprint comes from logistics, and beyond rail, what other measures are being taken to reduce transport-related emissions across the value chain?

Emilio Braghi: Rail already plays a central role in Novelis’ European freight network: it accounts for around 95 per cent of inter-company material deliveries between the company’s ten European production sites. Through the strategic partnership with LINEAS, the largest private rail freight company in Europe, Novelis moves more than 1,000 freight trains per year across Germany to transport aluminium ingots, coils and scrap between European sites. In general, compared with road transport, rail is estimated to save approximately 78 per cent of CO₂e emissions. 

Beyond the rail partnership, Novelis is also investing in the efficiency and flexibility of its rail logistics network. The company has announced an investment of around USD 46.9 million (Euro 43 million) in 220 new Shimmns railcars, designed to transport aluminium coils, scrap and ingots.

These railcars are expected to improve train utilisation, optimise material flows, and increase visibility through GPS tracking. The additional rail capacity is expected to avoid approximately 2,000 truck trips annually, including on routes between Nachterstedt and Alunorf. Overall, these measures reflect Novelis’ aim to reduce transport-related emissions while strengthening the efficiency, resilience and circularity of its European aluminium value chain.