Green Investment Program planned at Kuusakoski

As an industrial recycler, Kuusakoski is at the forefront of the green transition. Recycling enables sustainable economic growth and is a solution to the global climate crisis with accompanied resource and energy scarcity. This creates a significant growth in demand for recycled materials.

”The investment program enables our competitiveness and growth in the coming years. With the program, we respond to the growing demand from our customers in our home markets. The program aims to increase capacity, enhance material yield and deliver cleaner end products, i.e. recycled raw materials”, says President and CEO Mikko Kuusilehto.

Kuusakoski´s processing capacity already provides extremely efficient metal recovery from waste streams, converting them back to raw materials. For example, thanks to the unique integrated reject plant and the advanced fractioning process, the metal recovery rate is world class.

”Recyclable materials are becoming more complex and impure – from the recycler´s point of view this means poorer and more difficult to process. At the same time, our customers require increasingly cleaner recycled raw materials to enable sustainable production and higher recycling content”.

Investment leads to organic growth

The total value of the new investment started this year amounts to €25 million. In the first phase, Kuusakoski is focusing on improving the competitiveness of its Heinola plant, the largest integrated recycling plant in Northern Europe.

The investments under construction are focused on increasing separation capacity of multi-metals. Kuusakoski is building a new integrated processing plant in Heinola for aluminium and copper containing materials. Additionally, the company will increase the pre-treatment capacity of metals and the separation capability, for example with the help of a next generation separation facility specialising in small fractions. The goal is to significantly increase the amount of clean end products.

Customer-focused strategy at the core

The benefit of the circular economy is greater, the more that primary and non-renewable raw materials can be replaced with recycled materials. For example, by producing more pure steel, copper, and aluminium fractions, Kuusakoski provides its customers with a higher utilisation rate of recycled material. The whole of society benefits from this. Emission savings achieved by Kuusakoski´s products, our carbon handprint, is over ten times more than the emissions caused, our carbon footprint.

“Today, all discussions with our customers are related, in one way or another, to the opportunities to build a more sustainable value chain with recycled raw materials. With our investment program we are able to provide our end customers with more efficient solutions for low-carbon and energy- efficient production”.