-: Hello, I'm Øyvind Berle,
I'm a partner at BCG in Oslo
and I'm here today with BjØrn Kjetil Mauritzen,
who's the head of sustainability at Norsk Hydro.
(gentle music)
Hydro is two companies in one.
One is the aluminum side and the other is the energy side.
-: We are a fully integrated company
all the way from the mine to the refining,
to the energy production, to the smelting,
to the downstream extrusions.
-: You've done quite a bit in terms of aluminum recycling.
Can you tell us more about that?
-: Recycling is a very important area of growth.
We have an ambition to grow from around 200,000 tons
of post-consumer scrap in 2020
to more than 1 million tons in 2030,
and we are already halfway.
This is very important
from a sustainability perspective
because you don't use the same amount of energy.
The use benefits of aluminum are the same
regardless whether it's recycled.
Primary aluminum can be produced
from a footprint of 20 kilos,
if you use coal as the fuel source.
down to three and a half,
as we are doing on a renewable-based smelters.
Recycling of post-consumer scrap is only half a kilo of CO2,
which is much, much lower
than the global average of 15 kilos.
-: Could you tell us about how you managed to
upgrade the quality of the mixed scrap you receive?
-: It's really important to maintain the alloys in aluminum
What you want to do is to avoid to mix those alloys
because then you get the more difficult product
that might not meet the specifications of the customers.
We are testing out highly advanced sorting facilities
where you can sort out the different alloys
from the shredded scrap.
Second, to have good control over procurement
for the scrap. It's important to optimize
all these different moving parts every day.
-: There is an increased focus on sustainability in Hydro.
What are the main components of your net zero strategy?
-: We have an ambition to to be at zero in 2050,
but we also have ambition to reduce our emissions by 30%
until 2030.
When we get to 2030,
we have three elements to sort out.
One is the natural gas consumption.
The plan there is to replace this by green hydrogen
and the second one is to take the CO2
out of the direct emissions
from the smelting process itself.
The last thing is the remaining smelters
in our portfolio now that are not 100% renewable based
Then we need to introduce more solar or wind.
Today, more than 25% of our smelter portfolio
is run on wind power.
In this decade, the most important thing we're doing
is to decarbonize our aluminum refinery.
It's the biggest aluminum refinery in the world
outside China.
Switching all the boilers for the steam generation
to renewable power
will take down the footprint of a refinery by 70%
and that feeds straight into the alumina
that is going into the smelter.
The investments you make in one part of the value chain
will actually feed through
and be very beneficial for the next step.
Equally important is building this market.
-: Are you seeing that the customers are running much faster
towards decarbonization than in the past?
-: The advanced customers
are definitely not just focusing on carbon,
they are focusing on the whole element of sustainability
-: How can other companies learn from Hydro
in terms of your ambition to drive sustainability
through the use of recycling?
-: To really understand the sustainability benefits
of recycling because it's not just on the carbon side.
Any material that we recycle will mean less land use,
less water consumption.
You need to educate customers,
helping them to calculate their footprint
that they need to show to their customers
or need to report on.
We see huge benefits of being fully integrated
because when the customer asks us
about all these data on sustainability,
we have all the data in house.