Everyone who looks eastward from the A 57 knows the four 85-meter-tall chimneys of the former aluminum smelter at the Neuss Rhine plant. Daniel Rinkert, SPD member of the German Bundestag from Grevenbroich, knows the 300-meter-long halls where primary aluminum was smelted with enormous energy input from many visits. Now he was back again, but the electrolysis furnaces have disappeared – replaced by partition walls for huge storage boxes.
This is transformation you can touch, the very concrete shift from a linear to a circular business model.
“Speira has exited energy-intensive primary production. This decision was unavoidable given the energy policy outlook for Germany and our responsibility for the future viability of our overall company. And our transformation into a pure recycling company – a path we began over 20 years ago – was further accelerated as a result,” explains Volker Backs, Managing Director of Speira.
Daniel Rinkert, member of the Bundestag and deputy spokesperson for climate and environment in the SPD parliamentary group, believes: “Speira is demonstrating how transformation can succeed with new economic momentum. The SPD’s task is to support companies in this process. Reliability and predictability are crucial. That’s why we will further accelerate planning and approval procedures and ensure there are no price jumps in emissions trading that would stifle the transformation.”
40 Million Euros for the Circular Economy
At the Rhine plant, Speira is investing 40 million euros in additional recycling capacity to ultimately achieve up to 1.5 million tons of CO2 savings per year. A new melting furnace exclusively for scrap was delivered in summer and is now being installed. Production is scheduled to begin in early 2026. At the same time, the third of four existing casting facilities is being converted and thus optimized for recycling alloys. This further reduces the Rhine plant’s ecological footprint.
The new scrap storage facility is already complete, as the furnaces and Speira’s ambition to develop the Rhine plant into Europe’s leading recycling hub need to be “fed.” The new storage areas comprise one-third of the shut-down smelter and will be supplemented with facilities for sampling incoming scrap.
“The long halls enabled us to think and plan big. This huge new scrap storage facility creates space for more input for all our recycling furnaces – not just the new one,” says Boris Kurth, Head of Beverage Can Business at Speira and Head of the Rhine Plant. “We need the sampling for scraps that have already been through one lifecycle. These ‘post-consumer scraps’ are a source we want to utilize much more extensively.”
Everything for the Fast Can
Aluminum alloys that are rolled into beverage cans after rolling will be melted in the new recycling furnace. In this market, Speira can particularly well demonstrate its sustainability ambitions. The beverage can is a very short-lived product; the lifecycle from production through filling, retail sale, consumption by the end user, disposal to recycling takes only around 60 days. This means that one and the same can aluminum passes through Speira’s recycling facilities many times per year, and the ecological advantage of state-of-the-art technology can be utilized particularly frequently and efficiently. That’s why Speira is also committed to continuously improving the recycling rate for beverage cans: Under the umbrella of the European Aluminium association, the company is researching recycling-friendly alloys together with other manufacturers and promoting deposit, return, and collection systems for the valuable lightweight metal.
