A new partnership is developing a ground-breaking project to revolutionise aluminium manufacturing and recycling in Australia.
The partnership, between the UNSW SMaRT Centre and Jamestrong, will enable the production of aerosol cans from recycled content, as well as from waste currently not recycled because it contains mixed materials including plastics at a facility in New South Wales.
The recycled aluminium will be introduced into the aerosol can production process, and the slugs produced on the new casting line will be used in the plant’s extrusion process to manufacture more than 100 million aerosol cans per year.
Professor Veena Sahajwalla, Director of the UNSW SMaRT Centre said the partnership had the potential to transform the use and re-use of aluminium by aligning recycling and manufacturing of mixed waste content that is currently not subject to traditional recycling processes.
“Our Green Aluminium MICROfactorieTM technology is able to recover aluminium from a range of mixed waste feedstocks including waste packaging.
“The innovative recovery of the recycled aluminium will be incorporated directly into the manufacturing process producing slugs, with varying degrees of recycled content available depending on production requirements.
“Every atom of aluminium that exists in our society, whether in multi-layered form or any other format, can actually be regenerated and brought back to life over and over again.”
While an exact date for implementation is yet to be determined, it is expected that the initial phase of creating a new $8 million aluminium casting line will be completed by about the middle of 2024.
Once operational, technologies developed at the UNSW Sustainable Materials Research and Technology (SMaRT) Centre micro-factory will be tested at the Jamestrong site, supplying a real-time production environment to fully evaluate the recycling processes.
