CAPITAL: The Voice of Business Issue 1, 2015 | Page 40

Hulamin’s new aluminium recycling plant under construction at Camps Drift in Pietermaritzburg. It is expected to open officially in the third quarter 2015. PHOTO: Barry du Plessis.
most energy-efficient and environmentally
friendly way to melt coated scrap. It uses
the volatile organic compounds present
in the coated beverage can scrap as fuel,
while producing fewer emissions into the
atmosphere and less processed furnace
dross, waste that has to be disposed of in
landfills.
This new plant will give Hulamin the
capacity to process the large numbers
of all-aluminium beverage cans that are
discarded by the country’s consumers.
Recycled UBCs will be made into aluminium
coils by Hulamin for the remanufacture of
all-aluminium beverage cans, in a process
that should see the average UBC go from a
used can to a new can in just 60 days.
Hulamin said this development forms

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| Issue 1 | Capital

“Aluminium is 100% recyclable
and requires only five
percent of the energy used in
the production of primary
aluminium ore.”
part of its strategy to reduce its primary
aluminium needs with increasing volumes
of recycled aluminium in future.
It projects that by 2017, 30 000 tons of
primary ingot, which Hulamin currently
sources from BHP Billiton’s Hillside
smelters, will be replaced by 30 000 tons of
scrap inputs from UBCs and other forms of
aluminium scrap.
A further 30 000 tons of scrap that the
company currently remelts as part of