Aleris International

Aleris is a global leader in the manufacture and sale of aluminum rolled products, with approximately 14 facilities in three geographically aligned business units in North America, Europe and China.  We serve a variety of end-use industries, including aerospace, automotive,defense, building and construction, transportation, packaging, and consumer goods. Click the video window below to view the Aleris story. Aleris produces a wide variety of aluminum rolled products for diverse industries worldwide.  Almost everything we make is manufactured to specific customer requirements. Our state-of-the-art manufacturing facilities produce rolled aluminum for everything from highly designed cladding for building facades to technically sophisticated aerospace plates that demand high quality and reliability standards.  And we offer a broad range of alloys to meet virtually any customer need.

Our facility in Buckhannon, West Virginia was built in 1999 to serve the electrical conductor industry and other light-gauge applications, primarily 1350 and 1100 alloy products. Since then, we have added to our capabilities in Buckhannon, including the manufacture of 3003 alloys for cookware products.

Facts

• Legal Entity Name: Aleris Rolled Products, Inc.
• Year Founded: 1999
• Key Products:
  • Mill Finish
  • Alloy Conductor Strips
  • Cookware Products

Aleris is grounded in the belief that aluminum offers our customers unlimited potential as they look to bring new products and solutions to the world.  We partner with customers globally  to help them capitalize on the benefits of aluminum, with a focus on providing quality, customization and creativity through high-performance and sustainable products.

We believe that aluminum has unlimited potential.  It is a widely-used, attractive industrial material, and compared to several alternative metals such as steel and copper, aluminum is lightweight, has a high strength-to-weight ratio and is resistant to corrosion.  Aluminum can be recycled repeatedly without any material decline in performance or quality. The recycling of aluminum delivers energy and capital investment savings relative to both the cost of producing primary aluminum and many other competing materials. The use of aluminum in a wide variety of applications continues to grow due to several factors, including urbanization in emerging economies, economic recovery in developed economies and an increasing global focus on sustainability.   The automotive industry, in particular, is embracing aluminum as an alternative to steel in automotive manufacturing as it offers the critical weight-savings required to meet the increasingly tighter fuel efficiency standards being implemented globally.  Aluminum’s strength, corrosion resistance, and formability make it the ideal material to meet the technical demands of the automotive industry without sacrificing safety or performance.

FACTS ABOUT ALUMINUM*

• Aluminum can absorb twice the crash energy of steel
• Aluminum-intensive cars save 44 million tons of CO2 emissions
• Nearly 75% of all aluminum ever produced is still in use today
• Recycling aluminum saves more than 90% of the energy needed to make new aluminum

Our manufacturing sites in North America, Europe and China produce rolled aluminum sheet, plate and fabricated products for various industries.

In North America we primarily serve the automotive,  building and construction, transportation and consumer durables industries through both direct relationships with manufacturers and as a supplier to metal distributors.  In the European market, we produce a variety of alloys and products for a number of technically sophisticated applications ‐ in aerospace plate and sheet, automotive sheet and heat-treated plate for other industries.  In China, we produce aluminum plate for the aerospace industry as well as a variety of technically demanding industrial uses.

Plate

Aleris manufactures many different plates in various standard and customer-specified alloys using some of the world’s most advanced hot and cold rolling mills. With a 160-inch (4.064 m) hot rolling mill and a 148-inch (3.760 m) cold rolling mill, we can produce very wide and ultra-thick plates, either heat treated or non-heat treated. High-quality aluminum plates from Aleris meet the most demanding standards, plus many individual customer specifications.

We have continued to expand our production capabilities to better serve global customers. Most recently, we opened a hot rolling mill in Zhenjiang, China designed to meet fast-growing regional and global demand for technically advanced aluminum plate products for aerospace and commercial plate customers. The state-of-the-art plant, one of only a handful in the world, was modeled after our facility in Koblenz, Germany. It is equipped to produce the most advanced value-added aluminum material for aerospace and leading manufacturers in a variety of fast-growing industries in China and worldwide. This latest facility is ISO certified and Nadcap accredited for the production of aircraft aluminum plate. Our investment in a full-scale direct-chill (DC) pilot caster at our facility in Koblenz, Germany, illustrates our commitment to increasing our technical leadership in highly demanding market segments. The specialized facility is able to cast full-scale ingots for trials as well as for serial production of aluminum-lithium products.

Sheet & Coil

Aleris is a leading producer of flat rolled aluminum sheet. We have continued to expand our capacity, geographic footprint and supply chain flexibility for this product segment – all of which enhances our level of service to customers.

We also have world-class automotive aluminum manufacturing capability in Duffel, Belgium, that produces the widest automotive body sheet available. Aleris expanded its Duffel facility to deliver state-of-the-art light-weight solutions that meet the tolerance and width needs of automotive applications. Through the installation of our new wide cold rolling mill, we better equipped to provide our customers with state-of-the-art lightweight solutions as tighter fuel efficiency requirements drive auto manufacturers to expand their application of aluminum to include hoods, door panels, and trunks. The company is investing $350 million in its Lewisport, Kentucky facility to bring these capabilities to North America. We expect to begin shipping to customers from this facility by 2017.

Our state-of-the-art equipment for sheet and coil production uses the Continuous Annealing Line with Pre-Treatment (CALP), which enables us to produce sheet and coil in various alloys and tempers, for many industries and a wide variety of applications.

Aleris is also a leading supplier of common-alloy, mill-finish (bare) sheet made from recycled aluminum via two different methods: direct-chill and continuous-cast. In direct-chill casting, molten metal is solidified in a water-cooled, open-ended mold and water is applied directly to the emerging ingot. Continuous casting rapidly solidifies molten metal in a cooled mold. The metal is continuously withdrawn and hot rolled while the mold is simultaneously replenished with liquid metal.

We believe that Aleris, and aluminum, play an important role in advancing the sustainability of the metals sector and improving the sustainability performance of the customers we serve. For many years, we have worked to reduce our operational footprint, while increasing use of recycled content in our products. In 2012, we further evolved our program, appointing a Vice President of Sustainability to oversee development of a holistic sustainability strategy for our company.

To inform our strategy, we engaged over 40 internal and external stakeholders, including functional leaders, customers, suppliers, investors and industry organizations, to better understand the economic, social and environmental issues driving sustainability across our entire value chain. We used these insights to conduct our first materiality assessment, ranking each issue according to its importance to stakeholders and our business strategy. The assessment identified 21 material issues and helped guide development of our first set of sustainability goals, which are highlighted throughout our sustainability report.