Befesa is an international company that specialises in industrial waste management. It leads in the steel and secondary aluminium production waste recycling market and operates plants in Europe and Asia.
Befesa provides an essential service by recycling hazardous waste – mainly steel mill filter dust and salt slag from secondary aluminium production – in the steel production value chain from scrap and aluminium producers.
Befesa runs 18 recycling plants and had 1,147 employees at the end of 2019. Sustainability is the key to Befesa’s activities, as it recycles more than 1.5 million items of hazardous waste each year and produces 1.2 million new materials from them, thus reducing the consumption of natural raw materials.
The main by-product of recycling steel mill filter dust and salt slag is Waelz Oxide (a zinc oxide containing around 70% zinc), aluminium concentrates and secondary aluminium alloys, which means that less energy is used to produce these metals than is used to mine and process the metal, and prevents the need to mine these limited natural resources.