Illimity Bank S p A : A story of tradition and innovation. The FECS Group case

Tradition and innovation. It is in the merger of these two ideas that one can understand the history of the FECS Group, which is a tale of how, over more than two decades ago, a spark of an idea was turned into the foundation for creating a market leader in a key contemporary industry. Today, the FECS Group is a critical part of the circular economy, recovering, treating and recycling scrap metal, with its plants temporarily hosting one of the most important materials in the contemporary world - aluminium.

This metal is a core material in consumer electronics and a host of other industries (including transport, construction and metalworking, to name but a few), and each year the Group's plants near Bergamo handle thousands of tons of it, turning it into ingots and other high-quality items that can be returned to the manufacturing cycle in an almost infinite circular process. This reduction in waste and land consumption can be equated to the FECS Group planting thousands of trees annually, which has evident benefits for the environment through reduced CO₂ emissions.

The figures for the FECS Group are highly impressive: each year, over 160,000 tons of scrap metal are handled using state-of-the-art crushing and sorting processes based on linear motors and specific-weight sink-float separation at two recently built plants. This means in excess of 65,000 tons of raw material, in the form of ingots, becomes ready to return to the aluminium circular economy and an additional 70,000 tons of semi-finished products can be sold on the secondary aluminium market. Perhaps the best example to translate the impact of such a circular economy into everyday life is the fact that over 7 million mocha coffee pots are made in Italy each year using recycled aluminium. And this aluminium could easily come from FECS Group plants.