Hydro CIRCAL

Hydro CIRCAL is our flagship recycled aluminium product, designed to help you meet your sustainability goals without compromising on quality or performance. With advanced and patented sorting technology, Hydro remelts scrap into vehicle parts, designer furniture, consumer electronics and building facades.

Aluminium is a circular material that can be infinitely recycled without any loss of quality. In fact, approximately 75% of all aluminium ever produced is still in use today. Whether it’s old windows, wheels or beverage cans, recycling aluminium requires just 5% of the energy needed to produce primary aluminium.

Since its launch in 2019, Hydro CIRCAL has set the benchmark for recycled aluminium, offering a minimum of 75% post-consumer scrap (PCS) content, verified by third-party auditor DNV. This high recycled content is made possible through Hydro’s advanced sourcing, sorting and traceability technologies. The higher the recycled content of post-consumer scrap, the lower the carbon footprint.

The production and raw materials in Hydro CIRCAL can be traced on an individual batch-by-batch level with a verification statement from third-party auditor DNV.

This is a unique advantage for customers seeking reliable information about where the raw materials are coming from, providing unmatched traceability and insight into the actual material used down to the specific molecules in your product. This level of transparency supports more credible sustainability reporting and decision making.

Hydro CIRCAL offers a carbon footprint as low as 1.9 kg CO2/kg aluminium, depending on the product type, confirmed by a third-party Environmental Product Declaration (EPD). The EPD represents an average value based on at least two years of production data.
Available in two product types, extrusion ingot and foundry alloys, Hydro CIRCAL enables low-carbon aluminium solutions across a broader range of industries.

Key features of Hydro CIRCAL

• Minimum 75% post-consumer scrap (PCS): Verified by DNV, ensuring high recycled content from end-of-life aluminium products.
• Traceability: Full batch-by-batch level traceability with third-party verification.
• Low-carbon footprint
• Extrusion ingot: 1.9 kg CO₂e/kg aluminium (verified by an EPD)
• Foundry alloys: EPD in development; expected to reflect low-carbon performance
• Produced at an ASI certified plant

Available in these products

Hydro CIRCAL extrusion ingot

• Typical end uses: Automotive and transportation, building systems, facades, and other architectural applications.

Hydro CIRCAL foundry alloys

Designed for automotive components such as wheels, battery boxes, structural castings and engine parts.

Certified production

Hydro CIRCAL is produced at plants certified by the Aluminium Stewardship Initiative (ASI), which ensures responsible and sustainable production. The Nowa Sól plant in Poland, which joined Hydro in 2023, and now produces Hydro CIRCAL foundry alloys, is not yet ASI certified, but is on track to be by the end of 2026.

Hydro CIRCAL extrusion ingot with 100% post-consumer scrap

Hydro CIRCAL extrusion ingot is also available with 100% post-consumer scrap in limited amounts.

This product comes with a carbon footprint of less than 0.5 kg CO2 per kg aluminium, 33 times lower than the global average. Producing Hydro CIRCAL 100R is both complicated and time-consuming, and is therefore currently only available in small, on-demand batches.

Using recycled aluminium in the production process means that a lower amount of heat (and therefore energy) is generated. This energy usually contributes to CO2 levels in the atmosphere, so by reducing the amount of energy required to create the material, the climate footprint is reduced.

The recycled content in Hydro CIRCAL refers exclusively to aluminium that has reached its end of life as a product in use and is brought back into the loop via recycling. This can, for example, be aluminium from demolished building projects, food and drink containers or even cars.