
Photo by Recycling Today staff.
Luxembourg-based Befesa S.A., a provider of byproducts handling and recycling services to producers of steel and aluminum, says its recent growth is allowing it to reduce the landfilling of metals-containing dusts and residues by recycling more than 2 million metric tons of material annually.
In the company’s Environmental Social and Governance (ESG) Report for 2021 it says its operations in Europe and North America are recycling furnace dust from electric arc furnace (EAF) steel mills and byproducts from secondary aluminum producers into marketable zinc and aluminum. The North American operations were formerly known as American Zinc Recycling but are now known as Befesa Zinc US Inc.
Its business model, says Befesa, entails “decreasing the cost of production by utilizing secondary materials, and reducing the environmental impact of metals production by reducing the amount of mining that is necessary.” Adds the firm, “From the climate change point of view, Befesa has a positive impact on the environment, saving an estimated 2.4 million metric tons of CO2 equivalents from entering the environment each year.
In part thanks to its Befesa Zinc US holdings, Befesa increased its furnace dust tonnage processed and recycled by 25.6 percent in 2021 compared with the prior year. Its total global output of recycled-content metals (predominantly zinc, iron oxide and aluminum) rose by 12.8 percent to 1.44 million metric tons in 2021 from about 1.28 million in 2020.
Writes the company in the recycling portion of its ESG report, “Befesa has a high efficiency in turning hazardous waste into valuable materials. Today, this efficiency is 88 percent. Befesa’s R&D team [is] focused on improving the recovery yield by finding alternative uses to the byproducts, hence, reducing the portion that goes to landfill.”
Regarding its outlook, Befesa predicts it “will benefit from global trends towards the shift to EAF steel production, waste reduction, and increasing focus on environmental impact, which will provide long-term growth to Befesa in the future years.”
The company’s chief financial officer Wolf Lehmann, interviewed by Recycling Today this May, said the firm’s business model involves collecting hazardous waste service charges, ensuring one source of stable revenue, while using zinc price hedging practices to help ensure its earnings power on the product sales side is “locked-in” rather than being subject to base metals price volatility.
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