KME Copper Recycling
Innovative Management of Resources
Copper is 100 percent recyclable by nature. It can be used over and over again without any loss of performance or qualities. Reason enough for KME to continuously optimize the efficiency of recycling processes.
Today, about half of all the raw material used in copper processing throughout Europe is gained by recycling, and even higher rates can be achieved by using innovative technologies. KME already obtains considerably more than half of all its raw material needs from copper recycling, and that share is constantly growing.
The use of smart technologies in modern KME smelting furnaces for recycling reduces processing times significantly, making for overall time savings and greater cost efficiency. Already today, all KME products for building applications that consist of pure copper are made exclusively from fully recycled copper. They are sold world-wide bearing the KME Ecological Copper quality seal. These products offer the major advantage of much lower CO2 emissions and around 85 percent less energy consumption than is needed in primary production.
KME copper recycling is based on constantly optimized processes to ensure state-of-the-art coordination of energy input, material mixing, special treatment for chemical reactions and separation of the various components involved. The handling of waste material generated in KME production processes along with clean returns from customers – who are refunded for sending back their chippings and scraps from industrial processing of semi-products delivered by KME – is perfectly organized. In addition, a steadily growing range of most versatile valuable scrap from used products is sorted by kind or size, degree of contamination, composition and copper content to be fed into specifically accommodated smelting processes and treatments for copper recovery.
KME meets the constantly growing demand for copper by making its material recycling ever more efficient. Constant optimization of disposal management and material recovery is key to securing the availability of sustainable copper processing for future generations. For KME, copper recycling is an important element of the supply chain that protects employment in the metalworking industry and keeps valuable resources close to where they are needed.
KME - Engineering Copper Solutions