Novelis Inc. broke ground on a $50 million recycling center in South Korea. With an annual casting capacity of 100 kilotonnes of low-carbon sheet ingot, the facility is expected to reduce the company’s carbon emissions by more than 420,000 tons each year. The recycling center is being built by Ulsan Aluminum, Novelis’ joint venture with Kobe Steel. It is expected to come online in 2024. Novelis is building the new recycling center to meet the long-term global demand for sustainable, low-carbon aluminum sheet for can, automotive and high-end specialty products. The facility will allow the Atlanta-based company to increase its recycling capacity by more than 20% to 440 kilotonnes in Korea and to enhance its capability to process different types of aluminum scrap.

Steel Dynamics Inc. selected Columbus, Miss., as the location for its previously announced recycled aluminum flat-rolled mill. Columbus is strategically located within the targeted Southeast market, bringing numerous competitive customer, recycled-material and renewable-energy advantages to the project. The planned $1.9 billion aluminum flat-rolled mill is designed to have an annual production capacity of 650,000 metric tons of finished products. The product offering will be supported by various value-added finishing lines, including CASH (continuous annealing solutions heat treating) lines, continuous coating, and s slitting and packaging operations. The rolling mill is currently expected to begin operations in mid-2025.

Novelis Inc. broke ground and began construction on its $2.5 billion recycling and rolling plant in Bay Minette, Ala. The facility is expected to create up to 1,000 new jobs and will have an initial capacity of 600 kilotonnes of finished aluminum goods per year focused on the beverage container market, with flexibility for automotive production. It also adds a new recycling center for beverage cans, increasing the company's recycling capacity by 15 billion cans per year when fully operational.

Rio Tinto is investing $29 million to build a new aluminum recycling facility at its Arvida Plant in Saguenay-Lac-Saint-Jean, Quebec, to expand its offering of low-carbon aluminum solutions for customers in the automotive, packaging and construction markets. According to Rio Tinto, the facility will make the company the first primary aluminum producer in North America to incorporate recycled post-consumer aluminum into aluminum alloys. The recycling center is expected to be operational in the second quarter of 2024 and will have an initial capacity of 30,000 tons per year. A remelting furnace equipped with regenerative burners and an automated scrap loading system will be installed in an existing building at the Arvida Plant. 

Believe it or not, there is good news out there regarding the economy. In fact, if you were to browse through the news section of our website, you can find several large investments in U.S. manufacturing – as well as the resulting creation of jobs – since the start of the year.

Steel Dynamics Inc. announced that its Board of Directors authorized the company to construct and operate a 650,000-metric-ton low-carbon, recycled aluminum flat-rolled mill, with two supporting satellite recycled-aluminum slab centers. The capital investment is estimated to be $2.2 billion for the three facilities, and commercial production is planned to begin in the first quarter 2025. The facility will utilize a significant amount of aluminum scrap in its production process supported by the company’s metals recycling platform, which Steel Dynamics says is the largest nonferrous metals recycler in North America.

New Mexico Governor Michelle Lujan Grisham announced that a capital investment group committed to creating over 950 jobs and investing more than $2 billion in the construction of an aluminum-can sheet rolling mill and recycling center in Valencia County, N.M. Manna Capital Partners, a private investment firm, will lead the project and operate the mill. Ball Corp., a provider of recyclable beverage packaging, will enter into a long-term supply agreement and intends to take a minority equity position in the mill. The group signed a letter of intent to purchase a 1,300-acre parcel in Los Lunas. Construction is scheduled to begin by late 2023, and manufacturing in anticipated to start in 2026. The facility will have the capacity to manufacture up to 1.3 billion pounds of aluminum annually.

Novelis Inc. will invest $2.5 billion to build a new low-carbon recycling and rolling plant in Bay Minette, Ala. The facility, which will have an initial capacity of 600 kilotonnes of finished aluminum goods per year, is expected to create up to 1,000 jobs. More than half of the capacity will be used to serve growing demand for aluminum beverage-can sheet in North America. According to Novelis, the facility will be the first fully integrated aluminum mill built in the United States in 40 years. The plant will make significant use of advanced automation and digital technologies, including artificial intelligence (AI), augmented reality and robotics. Site work is currently underway, and the company expects to begin commissioning in mid-2025.  

Novelis Inc. broke ground on a $365 million highly advanced recycling center in Guthrie, Ky. With an annual casting capacity of 240 kt of sheet ingot, the facility is expected to reduce the company’s carbon emissions by more than 1 million tons per year. It will add approximately 140 new jobs and will be built adjacent to Novelis’ existing automotive finishing plant in Guthrie. The new recycling center will be equipped with industry-leading processes and capabilities, including advanced shredding and sorting technology, as well as energy-efficient innovations to support the company’s sustainability goal to reduce energy intensity by 10% by 2026 and be net carbon neutral by 2050 or sooner.

Global aluminum company Hydro broke ground on its aluminum recycling plant in Cassopolis, Mich. Hydro will invest approximately $150 million in the facility, which will produce 265 million pounds of aluminum extrusion ingot per year and create approximately 70 new jobs. When completed, the plant will help Hydro reach its goal of doubling recycling of post-consumer aluminum by 2025. Applications for the aluminum produced in Cassopolis will be used for critical automotive applications and building system applications.