Cortizo has opened a €38m aluminium recycling plant in Coirós, A Coruña, as the Galician manufacturer expands its circular production strategy.
The Padrón-based company said the new facility will be capable of producing up to 100,000 tonnes a year of recycled aluminium billet made from post-consumer scrap, including materials recovered from windows, doors, façades and balustrades at the end of their useful life.
The plant, which covers 29,000 square metres on a 110,000 square metre site beside the A-6 motorway, was officially inaugurated at an event attended by Alfonso Rueda, President of the Xunta of Galicia, regional economy minister María Jesús Lorenzana, and the Mayor of Coirós, Francisco Quintela.
Raquel Cortizo, the company’s managing director, said the investment had equipped the complex with “the most advanced technology in the sector” and described it as the latest stage in a recycling strategy that began more than 30 years ago.
“This Coirós facility is not a passing trend, but rather another step in a process we have been carrying out for more than three decades,” she said. She added that Cortizo had launched a foundry in Padrón in the early 1990s, becoming, according to the company, the first business in Spain to fully close the aluminium production cycle by recovering production leftovers and turning them back into raw material.
The Coirós operation will focus on post-consumer aluminium. In the first stage of the process, scrap is shredded and sorted to remove other materials. The remaining aluminium is then melted in furnaces before being recast as billet, the cylindrical raw material used in profile extrusion.
Cortizo said the billet produced at the site, marketed as Infinity, measures seven metres in length and is available in diameters ranging from 153mm to 305mm.
The company said the recycled billet has one of the lowest carbon footprints on the market. Citing average figures from the European Aluminium Association, it said the process can cut carbon dioxide emissions by 86 per cent and reduce energy use by 95 per cent compared with primary billet production.
Ms Cortizo also pointed to the company’s broader investment programme in Galicia. She said Cortizo had spent €228m in the region over the past five years on projects including its Technological Campus, the expansion of its aluminium and PVC plants in Padrón, and the new Coirós recycling centre.
Mr Rueda praised what he described as Cortizo’s efforts in sustainability and the circular economy, calling the company a “benchmark” for other parts of the productive sector.
The plant has begun operations with 20 direct employees. Cortizo said it plans to double that workforce once the facility reaches full production capacity.
Why This Matters: Cortizo’s Coirós investment matters because fenestration’s sustainability challenge increasingly begins upstream, with materials. Securing large-scale post-consumer billet capacity strengthens supply resilience, lowers embodied carbon, and gives specifiers a clearer circularity story. For aluminium systems, this is not peripheral ESG messaging; it is becoming industrial strategy, with competitive consequences across Europe.
