Aluminum is essential across nearly every major U.S. commercial sector including automotive, aerospace, defense, electronics, and energy infrastructure. To keep pace with growing aluminum demand, recycling offers significant economic and strategic advantages. Targeted investments in collection, sorting, and re-melting capacity can strengthen the security and diversity of aluminum supply chains.
SAFE’s new issue brief, “Turning Scrap into Strength,” highlights the importance of treating aluminum scrap as a strategic asset:
- Aluminum recycling strengthens supply-chain resilience and national security, as expanding domestic recycling reduces reliance on foreign raw materials and exposure to global market disruptions, trade restrictions, or energy price shocks.
- Increasing recycling generates domestic supply for packaging, machinery, consumer durables and other commercial applications, thus allowing limited supplies of primary aluminum to be utilized for defense-specific applications where primary metal is required.
- With modest investments in recycling and processing technologies, the U.S. could recover and redeploy much of this scrap into vital applications, countering China’s dominance in aluminum production.
“Exporting high-value aluminum scrap reduces the volume of feedstock needed to increase domestic aluminum production,” said Joe Quinn, Executive Director of SAFE’s Center for Strategic Industrial Materials. “Increasing scrap supply will enhance the United States’ economic and national security by keeping a strategically valuable material within domestic supply chains.”
The Issue Brief includes four sets of policy recommendations.
- Producer Responsibility: Manufacturers that use aluminum can facilitate end-of-life recycling to allow aluminum producers to process metal that would otherwise be exported.
- Sorting Technology: Subsidies or tax incentives could accelerate the deployment of capital-intensive technologies that quickly separate high volumes of specific alloys.
- Domestic Content Requirements: The Department of War could establish minimum recycled content requirements for military hardware.
- Modernizing Regulations: Require buildings to be deconstructed instead of demolished when doing so would aid in recovery of meaningful volumes of recyclable metals.
