Secondary materials are reaching industrial specification, quietly
Recycled aluminium and steel are clearing tier-one automotive tolerances at scale.
Sustainability DeskPublished 13 days ago
Circularity spent a long decade as a consumer-facing story about packaging. The consequential version is happening in heavy materials, where the volumes are.
Secondary aluminium now meets structural automotive specification in commercial quantity, and the energy differential against primary production is large enough to be a competitive weapon.
The constraint is collection quality, which is a logistics problem rather than a metallurgical one — and therefore solvable with capital.
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