Rio Tinto in billion-dollar recycling push
Rio Tinto will make a billion-dollar push into the metal recycling industry as the mining giant seeks to put decarbonisation at the heart of its strategy.
Rio has spent the past week in advanced talks with private Canadian company Giampaolo Group and the parties were understood to be close to a deal on Friday evening AEST.
Ontario-based Giampaolo has multiple recycling businesses across steel and aluminium, and the deal was understood to be focused on Rio buying a stake in the company’s Matalco aluminium recycling business.
Rio Tinto chief Jakob Stausholm has a big focus on climate change. Trevor Collens
Rio’s vast hydroelectricity resources in Canada allow its smelters in Quebec to make some of the lowest-carbon aluminium in the world, and the acquisition of a scrap metal company has been pursued as part of Rio’s plan to further reduce the carbon footprint of its aluminium division.
Recycling the metal in old cars or beer cans is considered to be one of the major opportunities to reduce the carbon intensity of the aluminium industry. Most aluminium requires bauxite to be mined and transported to refineries that conduct a carbon-intensive process to make alumina, which then requires enormous amounts of electricity to be turned into aluminium.
But when aluminium products are recycled, the mining and refining stages can be bypassed and the amount of energy required to “remelt” scrap aluminium is barely 5 per cent of the energy required to turn alumina into aluminium.
The European Commission said in a 2021 technical report that 20 million tonnes of aluminium was made from recycled scrap in 2019; up from 1 million tonnes in 1980.
The European Commission estimated that greenhouse gas emissions from the global aluminium
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