Sustainable casting through utilisation of residual products

The goal is to provide foundries with sufficient knowledge to produce equivalent or better products with increased utilisation of residual products in the raw material, which leads to a significantly lowered environmental footprint.

The Swedish foundry industry is working intensively to implement a sustainable transition while maintaining a high competitiveness. A shift towards increased resource efficiency is both necessary and desirable within the industry. The handling waste products is, therefore, of great importance.

The foundry industry has for a long time been manufacturing products from scrap and its own recycled material. Today, the returns constitute in-gate systems, discarded parts, end-of-life products, scrap, and sometimes machining chips. However, there are no feasible concepts for using slag, grinding dust, contaminated chips, or filter dust returns. The approach in this project is to, practically and theoretically, investigate and develop new processing methods to transform these residual products into usable returns in the foundry process. The requirement is that the refinement is conducted as close as possible to the foundry to reduce unnecessary transportation, thereby optimizing material logistics.

The wide project consortium includes both large and small foundries and Technology suppliers covering several different metallic materials. The project intends to quickly provide knowledge that leads to major environmental gains for the entire foundry industry. The project’s cost savings opportunities centre in converting residual products, which companies presently pay to deposit into raw materials, which can be returned to production and generate income. Ultimately, environmental benefits together with the cost savings will increase the competitiveness of Swedish companies