Aluminum has been designated by the EU as a strategic and critical raw material because it sits at the core of, advanced manufacturing, defence, automotive, packaging, building, aerospace, defence, electrification and renewable energy technologies. From powering solar panels to enabling electricity grids, aluminum is indispensable to achieving the societal climate and resilience goals. Recycling aluminium uses just 5% of the energy required for primary production, effectively turning scrap into an energy “bank” and a valuable asset. There are, however, important barriers that delay complete circularity. Some of the major barriers include:
- inefficient and fragmented scrap sorting that leads to the accumulation of tramp elements (Fe, Cu, Zn, V, Ni, Pb, Na, Ca etc.) degrading material properties limiting use in high-performance, safety-critical products
- lack of impurity-tolerant alloy chemistries restricting the use of scrap-rich feedstock in high-performance products
- limited digital integration, with alloy design, process modelling, and sustainability assessments performed in isolation.
As a result, much of the recovered material is downcycled into low value cast products, constraining its potential to displace primary Al in demanding applications.
The session aims to stimulate discussion on the above issues and aims to attract high quality scientific presentations in areas such as:
- Advanced scrap characterization to improve sorting accuracy at industrial speeds.
- New and efficient sorting approaches, including robotic and AI-enabled scrap sorting
- Innovative melt refinement technologies to produce high quality secondary aluminum
- Advanced digital simulation and alloy design approaches for the development of impurity-tolerant and impurity-for-advantage alloy chemistries.
- Advanced characterization approaches to quantify the effect of impurities including chemical, microstructural and property characterization.
- 3D printing with recycled feedstock
- Building trust in recycled aluminum alloys: Digitalization for tracking CO2 and energy savings across the value chain