Recycling of Aluminium through Innovative Technology (REALITY)

The 36 month REALITY project will enable the development and industrial deployment of sensor-based scrap sorting technologies to separate wrought and cast alloys and then to further separate wrought alloys into alloy types for the first time. Full scale recycled scrap based sheet and castings will be produced and evaluated. End-of-life vehicles will be shredded and automatically sorted using state of the art sensing and sorting technologies. The recovered wrought and cast scrap will be alloyed, melt conditioned to remove or tolerate impurities and then supplied for either coil production or for the commercial scale shape casting production by high pressure vacuum diecasting. Materials evaluation and characterisation will be carried out on both the resultant sheet and cast product forms. Cost effective automated separation processes for shredder scrap will enable the closed-loop recycling of end-of-life vehicles back into high performance product forms for new vehicle body manufacture in the UK, providing significant CO2 savings (less or no primary metal) and major cost savings. The UK, the major exporter or the more than 1Mt of aluminium scrap from the EU each year, will be uniquely placed to use rather than export this precious scrap based secondary aluminium alloy resource.