Aluminium scrap recycling, China's NDC, Drone swarms

In the mid-2010s, the use of Aluminium in vehicle bodies in the US became prominent.

Aluminium-intensive vehicles entered the U.S. market around 2015, with Ford’s F-150 truck series among the first to be mass produced. By the early 2030s, many of these vehicles are projected to reach end-of-life, creating a surge of high-quality aluminium body sheet scrap — up to 350,000 tons annually in North America. Much of this sheet scrap is expected to be downcycled into low-grade castings or exported, which is a missed opportunity to use those resources as a source of high-quality domestic aluminium.

Though the aluminium used in the vehicles itself is high-grade, the scrapping process adds impurities - like iron screws, and other smaller parts. When this scrap is melted, the purity of the resulting alloy is too low for industrial and commercial applications. These then use primary aluminium - obtained from ore. If remelted aluminium scrap was used in place of primary aluminium, the energy use for making a part would fall by 95%.

Using advanced computing, researchers at the Oak Ridge National Lab were able to understand how different impurities affect the behaviour and chemistry of aluminium alloys, and determine an optimal blend which was then tested for making automotive parts. Called RidgeAlloy, the mixture consists of aluminum, magnesium, silicon, iron and manganese, and has strength, corrosion resistance and ductility. RidgeAlloy can be used in the structural castings of underbodies, frame components and other critical parts from post-consumer aluminium scrap.

US DefenceTech startup Auterion has raised $130 million to

“build swarms, not individual drones” by scaling production of its AuterionOS platform and Nemyx defense system, which turns autonomous drones into coordinated combat forces operating across air, land, and sea domains

Their software is already in use in active combat in Ukraine.

China will, by 2035,

• reduce economy-wide net greenhouse gas emissions by 7 percent to 10 percent from peak levels, striving to do better;

• increase the share of non-fossil fuels in total energy consumption to over 30 percent;

• expand the installed capacity of wind and solar power to over six times the 2020 levels, striving to bring the total to 3,600 gigawatts;

• scale up the total forest stock volume to over 24 billion cubic meters; make new energy vehicles the mainstream in the sales of new vehicles;

• expand the National Carbon Emissions Trading Market to cover major high-emission sectors;

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