Alutrade focuses on closed loops

Oldbury, United Kingdom-based Alutrade indicates it is working with “many of the U.K.’s top systems companies and fabricators” to match aluminum alloy scrap with targeted consuming destinations.

The company states that its “high-tech approach” toward aluminum scrap, which involves the full identification and segregation of scrap materials by their alloy type.

Aluminum in construction applications is “always used as an alloy, which means it is mixed with other elements to change is characteristics to suit the application,” states the company. On the one hand, aluminum scrap “can simply be melted and sold for production into a wide range of products, but by mixing the alloys, it is difficult to use the material again in its specific alloy grade,” according to Alutrade.

The firm states that its approach involves “first identifying the exact alloy that is being recycled using sophisticated X-ray equipment, and then employing state-of-the-art equipment which effectively strips all thermal breaks and other materials from the profile.”

What is left is the prime material, the alloy in its original state, can go back into the same product it came from without any loss of characteristics and at a 100 percent recyclability rate, according to Alutrade. “This is known as ‘closed-loop’ recycling, and as a result the recycled material has a higher value [and], consequently, Alutrade can generally offer higher prices for any aluminum requiring recycling,” the firm states in a March 2018 news release.

Alutrade is based in the Midlands of England and indicates that it serves “the whole of the U.K.,” supplying bins for the collection and recycling of aluminum profile scrap, including both new profile offcuts and profile from building remodeling or demolition projects.