The Diet Coke cans filling up your recycling bin could have a much shorter journey to their eventual destination thanks to a planned recycling center in Rosemount.
Spectro Alloys recently broke ground on a $71 million, 90,000-square-foot expansion to its campus in Rosemount, which will be the first of its kind in Minnesota. The new facility will allow Spectro Alloys to recycle scrap aluminum from building demolition, automotive scrap and industrial type sources, not to mention those beverage cans in single-sort recycling bins.
Currently, once aluminum beverage cans are sorted, they need to be sent to other states to be recycled.
Recycling aluminum is particularly important, said officials from both Spectro Alloys and the Minnesota Pollution Control Agency, because aluminum can be recycled any number of times without losing its strength or quality. Also, creating new aluminum from bauxite ore is much more energy intensive.
“It takes 95 percent less energy to produce aluminum from a can than it does from bauxite ore,” said Wayne Gjerde, recycling market development coordinator for the MPCA.
Since 1973, Spectro Alloys has recycled many other types of scrap aluminum, producing casting alloys that are turned into parts for new automobiles, appliances, power sports vehicles, lawn mowers and snow blowers among the list. The new plant will add 120 million pounds of annual recycling capacity and create up to 50 new full-time jobs.
Construction on the Spectro Alloys plant will continue through this year, and the facility is expected to begin production in mid-2025.
“It’s really exciting for us,” Spectro Alloys President Luke Palen said. “It opens the door to a whole new segment of the aluminum industry.”
From curbside to Kentucky
While the recycling journey ends for most people with the single-sort bin at the end of the driveway, that’s truly the beginning of the process for the cans’ future lives.
A worker sorts aluminum cans at Eureka Recycling in Minneapolis. (John Autey / Pioneer Press)
After a resident or employee places recycling in their bin, the recycling hauler takes the waste back to a local materials recovery facility, where the plastic, metal, glass, cardboard and paper items are sorted. The materials recovery facilities sort the waste and prepare it to be sold and eventually recycled at a specific mill or facility.
At Eureka Recycling in Northeast Minneapolis, the materials come in from the hauling trucks and are dumped on what is called the tip floor, a large warehouse area. Eureka handles residential recycling from Minneapolis, St. Paul and a few suburbs.
The materials are then picked up by a front-end loader and dumped into a machine that begins the pre-sorting process. As the recycling rides up conveyor belts, workers pick out non-recyclables from the moving piles. Things like plastic bags cause the process to stall, as employees often need to stop the sorting line and cut them out of the machines.
Then, the paper, glass, aluminum and plastics are sorted, and each has a different landing place.
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For Eureka, they are able to send certain paper products to the nearby WestRock mill in St. Paul, but in the case of aluminum beverage containers, there isn’t a local facility. Eureka sends most of those cans to Kentucky.
Other material recovery facilities will send their cans to facilities in the eastern or southern United States, places such as Ohio, Georgia and Alabama.
Eureka Recycling Co-President Miriam Holsinger said that adding recycling capabilities for aluminum beverage containers is a big step for the local industry. As a recycling company, she said, they try to prioritize using local resources when possible, and take into account environmental considerations like the transportation impact. Keeping the recycling in the community where it is eventually produced again creates a circular economy.
“When we are in the recycling industry, we’re doing this to benefit our community and benefit our environment,” Holsinger said. “It’s awesome that there’s a local market.”
‘Don’t throw away a job’
An architectural rendering shows Spectro Alloys’ proposed new plant in Rosemount, which will be the first mill in Minnesota to recycle aluminum cans. (Courtesy of the Opus Group)
Currently, Minnesota only recycles 45 percent of its used aluminum beverage containers, according to the Minnesota Pollution Control Agency. That number pales in comparison to the 90-plus percent recycling rates for other types of aluminum Spectro Alloys is already focused on.
Spectro and MPCA officials alike hope that this type of facility can cause a jump in the beverage container recycling rate.
“We always say, ‘Don’t throw away a job. Don’t throw away something that you can recycle,’” Gjerde said.
For the MPCA, the focus is on getting people to recognize the missed opportunities to recycle.
MPCA Recycling Market Development Project Leader Susan Heffron said there are opportunities for people at their workplace, bars and restaurants, even home holiday parties where people sometimes forsake sorting out cans.
“For 2022, we had 17,500 tons of aluminum cans recycled from Minnesotans. What that also means is that there are 19,000 tons that could get recycled in Minnesota. There is that much additional aluminum that is being thrown away,” Heffron said.
Part of the draw in recycling aluminum is that it never loses its utility, Spectro’s Palen said.
Printer paper can be recycled six to eight times before degrading, according to MPCA experts. Plastic can only go through the process two or three times.
It’s one of the reasons that larger aluminum scrap rarely makes it to a landfill, Palen said. Garnering larger numbers in Minnesota’s aluminum can segment presents a great growth opportunity, for both his business and the environment.
“It is estimated that 75 percent of all aluminum ever created is still in use,” Palen said.
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