GeT Metal Group and its subsidiary GeT Alloys have announced that they have eliminated virgin fossil fuels from their aluminium melting operations, with a new waste-to-energy initiative transforming roughly 150 000 end-of-life tyres a year into 1.44-million litres of industrial fuel.

GeT Alloys is a South African aluminium recycler, processing around 350-million used beverage cans, packaging items and post-consumer scraps a year into aluminium ingots.

As a result of the new initiative, the GeT Alloys facility has now replaced its monthly consumption of 120 000 litres of conventional heavy fuel oil (HFO) with tyre-derived fuel oil.

GeT Alloys says the fuel is recovered through a controlled, oxygen-free thermal conversion process that alters the chemical structure of the waste tyres.

To further close the loop, carbon black, a secondary product of the tyre waste-to-energy process, is captured and used within GeT Alloys’ own aluminium dross recovery operations.

Steel-wire recovered during the tyre conversion process is also retained and utilised within the GeT Metal Group.

This material is supplied as feedstock to GeT Steel, the group's steel foundry in Atlantis Industrial, where it is incorporated into the production of steel billets for the South African and export markets.

The GeT Alloys initiative also diverts around 12 500 waste tyres each month from landfills, tyre waste stockpiles and unmanaged dump sites.

“Before launching this initiative, our facility required massive volumes of conventional furnace oil to sustain our melting operations,” says GeT Metal Group director Andrew Bishop.

“By engineering a solution that transforms a problematic waste stream into a valuable manufacturing input, we have eliminated the use of virgin fossil fuels in our primary furnaces.

“This shows that heavy industry can successfully decouple production from fossil fuels through smart engineering.”

By displacing 1.44-million litres of conventional HFO a year, the initiative delivers an estimated greenhouse-gas (GHG) saving of 720 t of CO2 equivalent.

Calculated using internationally recognised emission factors consistent with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and the GHG Protocol methodologies, these savings represent the avoidance of heavy upstream emissions linked to crude oil extraction, refining and fuel transportation.

“Building this sustainable value-chain from collection to processing has allowed us to create 32 direct jobs across the recycling and manufacturing sectors, driving local economic development when it is needed most,” notes GeT Metal Group director Ebrahim Khan.