Novelis releases sustainability report

The Atlanta-based aluminum company Novelis has published its fiscal year 2014 sustainability report, which highlights progress the company is making in regards to improving the sustainability of its business, the aluminum industry and its broader value chain.

The sustainability report, "Adding More Aluminum, Creating Value," details Novelis’ efforts to increase its recycling capacity and the recycled content of its products to 80 percent by 2020, which requires less dependence on higher-carbon primary aluminum and more focus on innovation and technology to accelerate the use of recycled aluminum.

Novelis notes that its transformational business model, which is built on closed-loop recycling, comes when aluminum demand is high and the industries that Novelis serves—automotive, beverage can and specialty markets—are increasingly calling for lighter weight, low-carbon materials.

“We’re leading the industry to harness the sustainability potential of aluminum as a lightweight, infinitely recyclable metal,” says Phil Martens, Novelis president and CEO. “We’re still early in our journey—and that includes Novelis shifting to more recycled aluminum, which avoids 95 percent of the energy use and greenhouse gas emissions associated with primary production.”

The company points out at the end of its fiscal year 2014, it achieved 46 percent recycled content of its aluminum inputs, up 16 percent from the baseline years of 2007-2009 and is on track to hit 50 percent by the end of the year.

Novelis says its innovation efforts focus on the development of highly recyclable alloy compositions.

The company describes a marked expansion of its ability to serve the automotive industry, the fastest-growing market for its products, as automakers increasingly turn to lightweight vehicles that are more fuel-efficient vehicles with fewer emissions. Novelis invested $550 million to triple its automotive sheet capacity to serve growing demand and recently opened China’s first plant dedicated to the production of advanced heat-treated aluminum automotive sheet.

Novelis reports that the company works with its automotive customers to implement closed-loop manufacturing processes, taking back production scrap from automakers then remelting it, casting it and rolling it again.