Osnabrück, May 2025.
In the presence of the KME management, project partners and representatives from politics and business, KME officially commissioned its second refining furnace at the Osnabrück site on May 22, 2025. With this investment, the company is setting standards in terms of environmental compatibility and production efficiency - and at the same time reaffirming its long-term commitment to Germany as an industrial location.

KME attaches great importance to ensuring that the production processes at the Osnabrück site are not only highly efficient but also as sustainable and environmentally friendly as possible. Responsible use of natural resources and the continuous improvement of the environmental compatibility of products and production sites are an integral part of KME‘s environmental strategy and the company-wide process of decarbonization. In order to close material cycles even better in the future and to be able to use more recycling material instead of new metals (copper cathodes) from electrowinning, KME has built a second melting and refining furnace for copper, thus taking another pioneering step towards a sustainable circular economy and CO2 savings.

The refining process is an essential process step in the recycling of scrap with high economic relevance for KME in Osnabrück. Thanks to this strategic investment, the use of new metals can be largely dispensed with in future and copper scrap can be increasingly used instead. The previous use of recycling material was technologically limited to around 60%. With this project, we are improving the recycling rate to over 80%. In the innovative refining furnace, unwanted by-elements can be selectively removed from copper scrap by selective fire refining. This innovative technology is a significant step towards further optimizing resource efficiency at KME. It enables the substitution of primary copper, which is very energy-intensive to produce, with copper scrap and thus a significant reduction in the CO2 footprint of our products.

The steadily increasing global demand for copper, driven by emerging economies and current technological developments, gives the new refining furnace additional significance. Over the next two decades, a considerable additional demand for copper is expected in the automotive sector, in electrification and digitalization as well as in the energy transition. KME‘s products are used in a wide range of applications in automotive, electrical and energy technology, renewable energy technology, mechanical and plant engineering, electronics, telecommunications and the aerospace industry.

In February 2008, KME inaugurated the first refining furnace (“Raffo I”, see pictures below). In terms of environmental compatibility and production efficiency, this was already a pioneering innovation at the Osnabrück site and, for the copper industry at the time, a new type of refining furnace for melting and refining copper.

KME continues to consistently pursue a resource-conserving approach and actively contributes to advancing the circular economy in the copper processing sector. With the new refining furnace, the KME site in Osnabrück will not only become a center of innovative technologies, but also a pioneer in the sustainable and efficient use of resources.

The project, funded by the Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs and Climate Protection with an investment grant, underlines KME‘s commitment to a green future even in a difficult economic environment and sets an important example for sustainable corporate practices. Overall, a reduction in resource-related CO2 emissions of around 8,000 tons of CO2 per year can be achieved by implementing the measure.

The project was launched in 2023 and was completed in April 2025.