Hydro Announces £13m Investment in State-of-the-Art Scrap Sorting Facility at Wrexham Plant

A £13m investment on Wrexham Industrial Estate has been announced by Hydro.

Hydro has an aluminium recycling facility on based on the industrial estate with the plant having annual production capacity of 60,000 metric tons of extrusion ingot.

Hydro say they have now decided to invest £13m in a “state-of-the-art scrap sorting facility” at the recycling plant. The plant will have the capacity to source and sort over 30,000 tonnes of aluminium scrap annually, enough aluminium for over 100,000 electric vehicles.

They said, “The sorting facility will be located next to the extrusion ingot recycling plant and will provide 16 new local jobs. By introducing Hydro’s state-of-the-art HySort technology, Hydro Wrexham will be able to increase sorting accuracy and capacity, as well as increasing the ability to recycle post-consumer aluminium scrap.

“This new facility enables us to optimally sort a large variety of post-consumer scrap grades that are mainly exported out of the UK today, before continuing to the next step of the recycling process. This is an essential improvement in material flow that allows us to meet the increasing demand for low-carbon aluminium that we see particularly within the automotive, transport, and building and construction segments,” added Barry Salisbury, Hydro’s plant manager in Wrexham.

“The use of post-consumer aluminium scrap significantly reduces the CO2 footprint compared to so called pre-consumer, or process scrap, and primary aluminium. The investment in the sorting facility at Wrexham is one of several investments to reach Hydro’s overall ambition to step up growth investments in recycling towards 2030. The scrap will be sourced from local scrap suppliers in the region.

“In Hydro we are always looking for opportunities to reach our recycling ambitions. Our recycling plant in Wrexham is already an essential producer of high-quality aluminium in the UK market. With the increasing interest from European customers to buy low-carbon aluminium, this sorting facility is a logical next step in optimizing our recycling processes by using a wider range of post-consumer aluminium scrap,” says Ingrid Guddal, Head of Recycling in Hydro Aluminium Metal.

Construction of the sorting facility will commence in the autumn of 2024, and the plant is expected to be operational by January 2026.