Sierre plant (foundry with recycling line)
operating- Status
- operating
Products: Aluminium sheet and strip (under 6 mm)
An integrated plant – according to the company's description it covers the full chain from casting to finishing, with hot and cold rolling mills and a continuous annealing line, and works mainly for automotive. Novelis lists Sierre among its European rolling plants with integrated recycling operations (alongside Voerde, Neuss and Pieve), which means remelting of circulating and press shop scrap returned by car makers; there is no standalone recycling centre in Sierre, as in Nachterstedt or Latchford. The Sierre foundry is the site of deployment of Novelis Fusion technology (multi-alloy ingots), which allows a core with higher scrap content to be combined with cladding layers. In recent years an electric pusher furnace was commissioned along with heat recovery from casting water into the district heating network, and the Net Zero Lab Valais with OIKEN and HES-SO Valais-Wallis operates on site. Scrap throughput is not published. The Sierre plant is Europe's leading producer of body sheet and has supplied automotive for over forty years. Novelis leased this part of the plant from 2005, and in 2023–2024 it bought from Constellium the assets of the so-called north building together with equipment for EUR 200 million; in parallel a 50/50 joint venture of the two firms was created to manage the site's shared infrastructure. Constellium retained on the same site its own casthouses, extrusion plant and plate rolling mill. The Novelis plant has a full chain from casting to finishing, a continuous annealing line, laser cutting and a research centre specialising in body alloys and joining technologies. Among other things an electric pusher furnace and heat recovery to the district heating network were commissioned here as part of the Net Zero Lab Valais project.
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