We pursue
growth 

Enabling growth

Our new plant is a central building block in the Aurubis Metals for Progress: Driving Sustainable Growth company strategy. Growth is one pillar of this strategy — and the US was identified as an attractive growth market for recycling when the strategy was being developed. “Investing here in the US is absolutely the right move: Until now, the majority of US e-waste was exported, landfilled or not collected at all, causing valuable critical and strategic raw materials to be lost to local industry. Awareness of sustainability has grown in the meantime, and recycling materials are now increasingly seen as a critical source of raw materials as resources grow scarcer. “We are creating capacity for recovering precisely these raw materials,” David Schultheis explains. Starting in October 2020, he headed the strategy process at Aurubis and has been Managing Director of Aurubis Richmond since July 2023. “The new plant is a great example that has confirmed our prognoses — and shows what we can achieve together as a team.”

Securing supply chains

Aurubis Richmond is groundbreaking work and is making an important contribution to more sustainability and supply chain security in the US economy by recovering valuable raw materials — primarily copper, which is now on the Critical Materials List in the US — from recycling materials. With growing awareness of sustainability in the US, and as export rates fall, the supply of complex recycling material is rising.

Strengthening the network

After the second stage is completed, Aurubis Richmond will be able to process more than 180,000 t of e-waste and other complex recycling materials in a way that is sustainable and environmentally sound. For Aurubis, the new plant in Augusta is an important expansion of the integrated international smelter network and an attractive new site. It diversifies the business and project portfolio beyond Europe and considerably expands the supplier market for recycling material. This will raise the recycling percentage for our base and minor metals in the Aurubis Group in the future.

Leading the way

Getting from the idea to the new plant has been a long process that needed to be achieved in the shortest possible time. “We want to be a pioneer in recycling in the US, which is why we had to act very fast. Now we are opening nothing less than the first multimetal recycling plant in the US here,” Inge Hofkens says. She closely supervised the project as COO Multimetal Recycling.

Great interest

The COVID-19 lockdown presented unique challenges — not just in terms of the necessary potential site tours, but also for establishing relations on the ground. At the same time, is was repeatedly apparent that American decision-makers were very interested in sustainable, industrial value creation, economic growth, creating new jobs and educational opportunities, securing raw materials, and protecting the climate. Aurubis’ plans were positively received since they addressed all of these. Interest was especially keen in Richmond County in the US state of Georgia, which was ultimately selected. In Augusta the project was warmly welcomed, whether by the mayor, residents, educational institutions like the Technical College, all the way up to the state governor, and has received great support in all areas since.

From planning to implementation

Approval from the Supervisory Board followed, and the thorough preparations meant the project could shift directly from planning into implementation mode. On the day of the Supervisory Board meeting, a delegation from Augusta traveled to Hamburg so that the first contracts could be signed right after the meeting. The signatures to order the equipment followed a few days later. Here it was particularly evident how unique Aurubis’ expertise in metallurgical processes truly is — configuring the new equipment for the complex production processes necessitated close cooperation between Aurubis experts and equipment manufacturer SMS.

The plant grows

The groundbreaking in June 2022 kicked off construction on the new plant in a green field roughly 20 km southeast of the city of Augusta as the crow flies. At the same time, work began on a completely new organization — with all the necessary divisions from Occupational Safety and Plant Security to Finance, Purchasing and Sustainability. This included establishing networks with suppliers, neighbors and the entire region. This was also crucial for another important area: personnel planning and recruitment.

A growing team

Finding and qualifying enough employees was a key aspect in the search for a site, and is still relevant today. So the newly created plant team worked closely with the City of Augusta, local schools, technical colleges, and the university. Now, with just over 160 jobs, the first secondary smelter in the US has become an important employer in the Augusta metropolitan region and offers valuable educational opportunities and scholarships to train the experts of tomorrow. A community benefit agreement was concluded with Augusta Technical College and Aiken Technical College as well as with the Richmond County School system for scholarships and vocational training programs for young employees.

Active in the region

The company and the entire team are also involved in social engagement in a variety of ways. Everyone at Aurubis Richmond is granted time for volunteer work alongside their regular work — an opportunity many take advantage of. Aurubis now enjoys an excellent reputation and good network that extends far beyond the Central Savannah River Area (CSRA), which is reflected in the number of applications. “We held a recruiting event in spring and 350 people participated — a number that speaks for itself,” David Schultheis says with satisfaction.

An enthusiastic team

A growing, highly motivated team has been bringing the new plant to life: By February 2024, Aurubis Richmond had grown from five employees to more than 100 in just one year, a number that increased to 160 by the Ribbon-Cutting Ceremony in September. This rapid growth has also necessitated setting up and constantly fine-tuning work processes and communication paths. There is also a need to establish a company culture, with in-house and external employee events playing a part in this, from team and charity events to blood drives. Aurubis Richmond is also involved in social events in the region and showing what it means to be an attractive and responsible employer — whether at the local Christmas parade or events at the college.

Wrap-up of Ribbon Cutting Ceremony

Battery recycling: Demonstration plant ramps up

Using resources responsibly is a key element in what we do. We see keeping valuable metals in the material loop as our responsibility. This is also true for a trend of the future — electric mobility.

We expect an increase in the number of batteries from electric and hybrid vehicles to drive an additional growth market in recycling over the long term. This is where our recycling expertise comes into play: Using an innovative process developed in-house, we can recover valuable raw materials from used lithium-ion batteries that can be used for new products.

Aurubis developed and tested a patented process for responsibly recovering the metals from black mass. Black mass is what is left after an end-of-life battery has been disassembled and shredded: It is a powder-like substance that contains the valuable elements from the battery, including lithium, nickel, cobalt and manganese. In the battery recycling pilot plant at our Hamburg site, we successfully developed special technologies in a relatively short time that have since been patented. This innovative process offers an exceptionally high recovery rate: In our smelter network, we recover around 95 % of the battery metals from black mass — including lithium, a light metal that is economically crucial and can only be mined in a few regions in the world. With the high metal recycling efficiency of the process we have developed, Aurubis is already considerably surpassing EU guidelines and targets that stipulate minimum recycling efficiencies for some metals in lithium-ion batteries.

Aurubis is now taking the next step and building a demonstration plant. The plant for testing a subprocess on an industrial scale was set up in calendar year 2024, and the first campaigns for extracting metals from black mass have begun. The main unit in the demonstration plant is 50 times larger than in the pilot plant and will continue to deliver findings about operating on an industrial scale. In addition to expanding our metallurgical expertise, Aurubis has also entered into other partnerships, such as with the Talga Group Ltd., an Australian battery material and technology company. With this development project, Aurubis aims to extend the Talga technology to all Aurubis graphite products through closer collaboration between both companies. Initial test series have shown promising results.

This is how we are developing the building blocks for a flexible market entry strategy tailored to the technical and economic requirements of this future market.