Ferrovial Services opens a new aluminium recycling plant in Barcelona

With this new facility, the company moves a step further into the value chain for the management of reusable materials. Ferrovial Services has recently opened a new aluminium recycling plant for the recovery and reuse of aluminium at the Centre for Environmental Management in Santa María de Palutordera (Barcelona). The facility is owned by the company and represents a qualitative leap in the management of reusable materials. The plant will process the aluminium separated and recovered at other treatment plants, such as Ecoparques or packaging classification plants, with the aim of enhancing the quality of the recovered material so that it can subsequently be sold directly to foundries with no further intermediaries being required. Ferrovial can therefore optimise the aluminium recovery process started in other treatment plants it already manages.

Cutting edge technology

This new aluminium recycling facility is at the forefront of aluminium recovery technology, especially with regard to efficiency in the cleaning of the aluminium. The process is contained within two large blocks. The first of these consists in the manual separation of non-container aluminium, which is not considered adequate, with the second block carrying out automatic separation of container aluminium to achieve the purity required for smelting. With a processing capacity of 2 tonnes per hour, estimates are that at least 1,800 tonnes of aluminium will be recovered in 2017.

Ferrovial Services, supplier for the largest aluminium foundry in the world  

The company has additionally reached an agreement with Novelis, the largest aluminium packaging foundry in the world, to supply aluminium to its facilities in Germany, which produce 300.000 tonnes of aluminium tins per year. This contract will run for five years.​