Webinar Summary: Emerging Standards to Support the Circular Transition: What They Mean for the Aluminium Industry
How can international standards better support circularity in sectors like aluminium, where secondary markets are already well established?
27 May 2025
This session of ASI’s “45 Minutes on…” webinar series explored how international standardisation efforts are evolving to support a circular economy, with a focus on their relevance to the aluminium industry. The event featured experts of the Yordas Group, who are contributing to two proposed standards being developed under the ISO 59000 framework in collaboration with Japan’s Hitachi–AIST Circular Economy Research Lab.
The proposed standards aim to:
- Introduce a new economic metric to complement existing resource- and material-focused indicators; and
- Support the quality assessment of products and materials at end-of-life, enabling their reuse, recycling, or remanufacturing within circular value chains.
The session highlighted how these emerging tools are designed to work across materials and sectors, prompting reflection on how they apply in industries like aluminium—where material value is well understood and end markets for scrap are often already established. In such contexts, the challenge lies less in finding a destination for secondary material and more in ensuring effective collection and return systems.
Participants raised important considerations about how the proposed standards can accommodate the varied realities across sectors—from metals to construction materials—and how they may need to account for differences in circular infrastructure, supply chain logistics, and material traceability.
The Yordas team emphasised that these standards are still in development and will undergo extended international consultation. Stakeholder engagement, particularly from the aluminium sector and recyclers, was strongly encouraged to ensure sector-specific needs are represented in future drafts.
While detailed content remains under ISO confidentiality, the webinar provided a timely opportunity for ASI members to reflect on how these proposals may align with ASI’s ongoing standards revision and contribute to more harmonised, practical approaches to circularity. Visit the Revision Hub for more information on the ongoing Standards Revision.
If you would like to share feedback or discuss the proposed standards with Yordas Group, get in touch with Dr Giselle Vincett.
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