Remade Institute reports secondary aluminum melt shop advancement

The Rochester, New York-based Reducing Embodied Energy and Decreasing Emissions (Remade) Institute says it has developed a technological innovation capable of removing metallic impurities from recycled aluminum melts, thereby improving the quality of the aluminum and allowing it to be used for more diverse applications, including electric vehicle (EV) manufacturing.

Remade, a 170-member public-private partnership established and funded in part by the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE), says the technique emanated from a research and development project first funded by Remade in 2020.

That research and development project, “Selective Recovery of Elements from Molten Aluminum Alloys,” is still in progress and is led by Subodh Das, CEO of St. Louis-based Phinix LLC. The patent-pending intellectual property has been licensed by Phinix to a United States-based secondary aluminum producer not disclosed by Phinix.

“Congratulations to the entire project team, including Phinix’s Dr. Das and our tech team at the Institute,” Remade CEO Nabil Nasr says. “A new technology license is a tremendous accomplishment. We believe this technology will be incredibly valuable to U.S.-based aluminum companies, including those that supply the automotive industry. Ultimately, it’s yet another key technology that accelerates the U.S.’s transition to a circular economy and assists the nation in meeting its net zero by 2050 goal.”

“This technology is capable of benefiting aluminum companies significantly," Das adds. "It’s capable of lowering their energy costs, increasing their profits and increasing the overall value of recycled aluminum considerably.”

Remade Chief Technology Officer Magdi Azer says the tech license is another milestone for the public-private partnership, which seeks to increase the reuse, remanufacturing, recycling and recovery of four energy-intensive materials: metals (including steel and aluminum); polymers, including plastics; fibers, including papers and textiles; and electronic scrap.

“Remade is selective in funding R&D projects that have the greatest potential to reduce energy consumption, decrease greenhouse gas emissions, decrease the use of raw or primary materials and increase the use of recycled or secondary materials," Azer says. "This particular R&D project [can] increase the resiliency of the U.S. supply chain and decrease the nation’s reliance on imported virgin aluminum from other countries.”

According to the R&D project team, producing recycled-content aluminum costs less and saves more than 90 percent of the energy required to produce virgin, or primary, aluminum.

The U.S. Geological Survey estimates U.S. consumption of aluminum in 2022 was 5.1 million metric tons. Of that, about 2.74 million metric tons was imported, 860,000 metric tons was produced domestically from primary ores, and the balance of 1.5 million metric tons was produced domestically from scrap.