Over the next decade, a tidal wave of aluminum scrap from vehicles is expected to hit U.S. salvage yards.
Much of it will come from aluminum-intensive vehicles like Ford’s F-150 trucks, which entered mass production around 2015 and will start reaching the end of their lives by the early 2030s.
This means hundreds of thousands of tons of auto body sheet aluminum will be shredded and recycled every year.
The problem?
The scrap is often too contaminated to be reused in new, high-strength parts like car frames and underbodies. Instead, most of it is “downcycled” into lower-value castings or even exported, leaving automakers reliant on imported primary aluminum made from raw ore.
That may be about to change. Scientists at the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) have developed a new aluminum alloy called RidgeAlloy, designed to transform low-value scrap into a high-quality resource for making structural automotive components.
By doing so, RidgeAlloy could boost the domestic auto supply chain, slash energy use, and reduce dependence on imported aluminum.
Aluminum is considered a critical material for the U.S. because of its role in energy technologies, from cars and planes to power transmission and storage.
Yet producing primary aluminum is extremely energy-intensive and heavily reliant on foreign sources. Using scrap instead is far more sustainable: ORNL estimates it can reduce energy needs by up to 95% compared with producing aluminum from ore.
The difficulty lies in impurities. When vehicles are shredded, iron and other elements from fasteners like rivets get mixed into the aluminum.
These impurities disrupt the chemistry of the scrap, making it too unpredictable to reuse in high-value applications. Traditionally, this has limited recycled aluminum to non-structural parts such as engine blocks.
To overcome this challenge, ORNL researchers used cutting-edge tools, including high-throughput computing that ran more than two million calculations to predict optimal alloy compositions, and neutron diffraction at ORNL’s Spallation Neutron Source to observe the internal structures of metals at the atomic level.
By combining powerful simulations with experimental testing, the team pinpointed a blend of aluminum, magnesium, silicon, iron, and manganese that could deliver strength, ductility, and crash resistance even with higher levels of impurities.
In just 15 months, the researchers advanced from concept to full-scale demonstration—a lightning-fast timeline for materials innovation.
Working with industry partners, they melted down recycled aluminum ingots made from mixed auto body scrap, recast them according to RidgeAlloy’s formula, and tested them in real-world conditions. A manufacturing partner in Michigan successfully cast the alloy into medium-sized automotive parts using high-pressure die-casting.
The results showed RidgeAlloy met the demanding requirements for structural vehicle parts, paving the way toward even larger castings in the future, including “giga-castings” for entire underbodies or frames.
The implications are significant. By the early 2030s, RidgeAlloy could enable recycled castings equal to at least half of the annual primary aluminum production in the U.S. That would not only reduce costs and energy use but also strengthen America’s ability to rely on its own scrap supply chain rather than imports.
“RidgeAlloy offers the first technology capable of recapturing the value of a fast-approaching and historically massive wave of domestic, high-quality recycled automotive aluminum sheet alloys,” said Allen Haynes, director of ORNL’s Light Metals Core Program.
Beyond cars, RidgeAlloy could also find applications in aerospace, industrial machinery, farm equipment, power generation systems, and recreational vehicles like motorcycles, snowmobiles, and boats.
By turning discarded aluminum into a reliable, high-value resource, RidgeAlloy could reshape the economics of recycling and give the U.S. auto industry a sustainable edge.
