The Group’s recycling center is located in Lünen in North-Rhine Westphalia. The procurement activities of the Recycling business sector are organized from there. These are supported by a wide network of purchasing agencies.

Copper has been recycled at the Lünen site since 1916 – until 1999 by Hüttenwerke Kayser AG. After the amalgamation and integration of the works in the Aurubis Group, the smelter sector was modernized in 2000 and complex secondary raw material recycling was expanded. Today, our recycling center is equipped with special plants to prepare material and with the Kayser Recycling System (KRS), an environmentally friendly facility for smelting and enriching non-ferrous metals and precious metals. In 2007 the most modern plant in Europe for sampling electronic scrap was commissioned in Lünen, in which precious metal-bearing electronic components, such as plug connectors, printed circuit boards and microprocessors are sampled and crushed. An anode furnace plant for copper anode production and a 220,000 t tankhouse for cathode production complete the production site.

The focus of secondary copper production at the Group’s headquarters in Hamburg is the enrichment and recovery of precious metals and the separation of various by-metals that result from the copper recovery process. Metal-bearing intermediates, high precious-metal bearing raw materials and other materials are processed here in a secondary smelter. Copper production is mainly based on copper concentrate processing, though copper scrap is also processed in Hamburg. Copper scrap is used to recover copper at our primary smelter site in Pirdop, Bulgaria as well as the site in Olen, Belgium.

As a certified specialized waste management company, E.R.N. Elektro-Recycling Nord GmbH in Hamburg operates diversified shredder facilities in order to extract non-ferrous metal and precious metal fractions from previously dismantled end-of-life electrical and electronic equipment. These are supplied to the steel and aluminum industry as well as within the Group to the copper smelter operations in Hamburg and Lünen.

Cablo Metall-Recycling und Handel GmbH in Fehrbellin, not far from Berlin, has specialized in recycling copper and aluminum cable scrap and produces high-grade metal granules in accordance with customer specifications. Plastic items are produced from cable insulation.