Environmental benefits through effective resource management

The Stena Nordic Recycling Center in Halmstad is the hub of the Group’s industrial recycling infrastructure. The facility represents a great leap forward in efficient resource management, which benefits customers and the environment.

Since its inauguration in October 2016, the facility is evolving step-by-step towards its goals.

Recycling positively affects climate change due to the major energy savings of extracting raw materials from waste instead of using virgin raw materials.

The recycling and energy recovery processes at the Stena Nordic Recycling Center move large amounts of material up the waste hierarchy. Thanks to the increased recycling rates it achieves, energy savings and environmental benefits increase. Every year, approximately 300,000 tonnes of ferrous and non-ferrous metals are supplied to smelters around the world.

So far, the Group has invested approximately 800,000 MSEK in recycling processes at the new facility. These investments are built around collaboration with customers and partners, not least those in the automotive industry.

Through the new processes, end-of-life vehicles can now achieve a 95 percent recycling rate. Stena is one of the first recyclers in the world to meet this EU requirement and has signed agreements with all vehicle manufacturers.

It only takes 40 seconds for a car to be processed in the facility’s mills. Once it has passed through the recycling process, thirty different grades of material are produced in different sizes. Iron, aluminium, copper, other metals and plastics are so accurately sorted that they can be sent straight to smelters, foundries and other manufacturers around the world.

Improved recycling processes mean that less waste is left over. Shredder Light Fraction (SLF) is a mix of residues from vehicle recycling that it was previously difficult to recycle. Stena Recycling’s new SLF facility uses its own unique chain of processes, which reduces landfill deposition by 40 percent.

At the end of 2016/2017, Stena Technoworld opened a new precious metals recycling (PMR) facility. It is Europe’s largest and has the capacity to handle 90,000 tonnes of electronic scrap per year.

FUTURE FOCUS AT STENA NORDIC RECYCLING CENTER:

• Identifying solutions that increase plastic recycling.
• Finding new areas of use for the residual fraction fines. for example as a construction or cover material.
• Producing even cleaner metal fractions in order to increase European sales.