Recycling revolution: Speira upgrades plants with advanced furnaces for low-grade scrap

Speira is enhancing its facilities in Grevenbroich and Töging in Germany by installing two new furnaces at each site and replacing the existing units with cutting-edge systems. These upgrades include four tiltable rotary furnaces designed to boost the company’s capacity for recycling challenging materials, such as heavily contaminated scrap (low-grade) and dross generated during the melting process.

Speira is a leading European Aluminium rolling and recycling company. It comprises eleven recycling and production sites in Germany and Norway, as well as its own research and development. Speira recycles up to 650,000 tonnes of aluminium per year and produces around one million tons of advanced rolled products.

In his role as Head of Recycling Services in Speira's other business areas and for external clients in the automotive and packaging sectors, Ralf Köring explains, "We take a holistic view of our contribution to a functioning circular economy. That's why we don't just look at the pure, easy-to-recycle scraps but also at the more difficult lower grades and by-products. Wherever aluminium is in it, we want to get the maximum out of it and put it back into the cycle."

Speira is investing approximately eleven million euros in four new furnaces. This investment includes charging machines, suction hoods, thermal afterburners, piping, and other infrastructure. The integration of state-of-the-art burner technology and automatic charging will enhance metal yield.

The new units will also improve employee safety and ease of work, as the individual components are easily accessible for maintenance, molten metal can be tapped with the furnace doors closed, and wheel loader and forklift traffic in front of the furnaces is minimised due to the charging machines. These new furnaces meet the highest environmental standards, with advanced suction and burner technology that reduces CO2 emissions. Additionally, the furnaces are "H2 ready," meaning they can be operated with hydrogen in the future.

In terms of energy efficiency, the new furnaces offer threefold improvements:

• The increased throughput significantly reduces energy consumption, as each tonne of recycled aluminium saves up to 95 per cent of the energy required to produce a tonne of primary aluminium.
• Modern burner and afterburner technology ensures optimal energy yield from the natural gas used. It also utilises the adhering impurities of low-grade scraps as combustibles in the melting process and expands the input spectrum for these grades.
• The optimised furnace design minimises heat loss through the automatic charging process and tapping with closed furnace doors, further enhancing energy efficiency.