February 2, 2021SOLUTIONS

Recovery and reuse of aluminium

The photo shows a briquette of pressed aluminium.

To look at it you might think it was a piece of minimalist furnishing, but it is actually machining waste compressed via a simple yet extraordinary process.

We are in the Group’s Blister Tooling plant, which does not assemble packaging machines but rather creates format components and special parts from aluminium, produced by machining centres which run 24/7.

In this kind of industrial facility, manual emptying of the crates with machining residue would have been difficult to implement. This is why we decided to construct special extraction systems which suck up the residue and direct it into dedicated containers, where it is pressed into briquettes. This process is able to compress the swarf down to as little as a tenth of its original volume.

In the end, these compacted briquettes - composed of pure aluminium without any oil - are sold to specialised companies which melt them down and put them back into the production chain.