Alutrade helps McLaren delivery pioneering circular economy project

As a forward-thinking company that’s already making major strides in achieving successful closed loop results company-wide and for our customers, we’ve now partnered with McLaren Construction for a pioneering circular economy project.

McLaren have spent the last 18 months working with their supply chain partners, Saint-Gobain and Powerday, to recycle window glass as part of their Chalcots Estate refurbishment initiative in Camden.

In the region of 90 tonnes of glass and 200 tonnes of aluminium from 644 apartments is being recycled using closed loop processes, further enabling McLaren to achieve its Net Zero Carbon Scope 1, 2 and 3 targets by 2045.

Our work on taking the end-of-life aluminium frames back through the circular economy started in January and is anticipated to finish later this year.

“Post-consumer window scrap volumes are only ever going to increase as buildings need to become more energy efficient. We’re making weekly collections from the Chalcots Estate – the material is then processed and sent to the remelt for billet production, typically within a fortnight,” explains our Commercial Manager, Ed George.

Once the material arrives on our site, we separate the aluminium away from all of the other materials that are attached to the frames. This includes locks, handles, cleats and gaskets. Once the aluminium has been recovered, it’s clean enough to be melted, which makes it around 97% clean. Due to the fact we are zero-to-landfill site, every single element gets recycled.

For more on our closed loop capabilities and the positive impact they are having on our customers, i.e. dramatically improving their scrap recycling rates, read ‘How we helped Origin Global 100% improve their scrap recycling rates.’

In the meantime, for more details about the window glass recycling project in London, watch this video case study.