Coventry University is working with an award-winning West Midlands aluminium foundry to find out whether recycled aluminium can be turned into the ultra-high-grade material needed by British industry.
The partnership with Alucast, part of the university’s Clean Futures Programme, is tackling one of manufacturing’s trickier supply chain problems.
Sectors such as automotive and defence depend on primary-grade aluminium alloys, but the UK doesn’t produce enough of its own — importing as much as 1.25 million tonnes of the material every year.
Recycled, or “end-of-life”, aluminium is often too contaminated to meet the strict purity standards these industries demand. But researchers at Coventry University’s Institute for Advanced Manufacturing and Engineering (AME) have been studying the material’s full lifecycle, and how it is processed after use, to find ways of sourcing and reprocessing scrap aluminium so it can reach the grade required.
The work is designed to help Alucast cut both carbon emissions and costs, while easing pressure on the world’s raw material resources.
Professor Marcos Kauffman, Director of the AME, said the collaboration showed how targeted research could deliver quick, practical results with both commercial and environmental value. He explained that developing a pathway to recycled material brings a “triple benefit”: rebuilding a domestic supply chain for a critical material, opening up cheaper alternative feedstocks, and cutting embodied emissions by avoiding the energy-hungry process of extracting aluminium from ore.
Professor Kauffman added that projects of this kind protect and create manufacturing jobs by giving UK firms a competitive edge and making the country a more attractive place to invest in, as circular manufacturing supply chains continue to develop.
John Swift, Director at Alucast, said the university’s help had allowed the firm to source a different type of end-of-life scrap. Once sorted and re-alloyed, he said, it matched the mechanical performance of primary-grade aluminium — both in test bars and in castings used for automotive production.
The project forms part of Coventry University’s wider Clean Futures Programme, which supports sustainability and clean growth research, and reflects the growing role the university’s AME institute is playing in helping regional manufacturers move towards more sustainable, circular ways of working.
