TRIMET expands the recycling plant in Gelsenkirchen. With the expansion of the production facilities, TRIMET is continuing the measures of recent years to modernize and expand the recycling area. By the end of 2023, among other things, another melting furnace and an additional casting plant are to start operation. This will increase production capacity by around 20 percent and create up to 15 new jobs.
In recent years, TRIMET has already invested in modern furnace technology new storage areas at the Gelsenkirchen site. This has enabled production capacity to be expanded and immission control to be improved. Now the expansion continues. Construction work will soon start on the premises in the Gelsenkirchen city harbor to make room for another melting furnace and an additional casting carousel for pouring sows.
The new melting unit is a tilting drum furnace. It permits rapid alloy changes and is particularly suitable for remelting material with many constituents. Compared with the conventional process in single- or multi-chamber furnaces, the tilting drum furnace works faster and thus manages more operations per shift. In addition, metal losses are reduced to a minimum, increasing the metal recovery rate by up to five percent. The improved resource efficiency is also reflected in fuel consumption, which is around 30 percent lower. The new casting carousel will be able to cast 18 aluminum sows weighing 780 kilograms each at hourly intervals. All process steps are automated, from casting and skimming to labeling, weighing and depositing the sows on a conveyor belt. In the course of the expansion, the infrastructure of the recycling plant will also be adapted and modernized.
After the commissioning of the new facilities at the end of 2023, the development in Gelsenkirchen will go even further. The goal is for TRIMET Gelsenkirchen to be the aluminum remelting plant with the lowest CO2 emissions in Europe in five years. To achieve the goal, further measures are being tackled. These include converting the industrial trucks to electric operation, converting the process heat supply to hydrogen-rich coke oven gas and, in the long term, to green hydrogen, using the process heat for electricity generation or as district heating, and installing a photovoltaic system on the scrap storage facilities.