ALKU is a company founded in May 1983. The company’s initial challenge was to find a suitable solution for the recovery of cable with insulation. The previous method, namely burning off the cable, was in the process of being banned by law; as a result there was major time pressure to find an alternative. However attempts in a brick works and a clay works were without success, because huge amounts of waste gas were generated. Even more significantly, the quality of the copper was negatively affected by the burning process and an important raw material was lost as the insulation was burned away. There seemed to be no way out of the situation, but we refused to let the challenge defeat us. The initial spark of the solution ignited on a Sunday evening: a television report showed a granulating installation which subsequently processes the plastic into floor panels. The ideal solution: remnants of cable are put in at the front, in the middle the copper nuggets are separated out and at the end the plastic is reprocessed straightaway – and all of this in a single working process! We were totally enthusiastic and completely convinced that we needed such a unit. So we immediately started searching for manufacturers. However this proved to be more difficult than expected, as these installations were only available in large-scale format for established dealers in waste and metal. All the installations already in existence, ca. 10 of them in Germany, were a well-guarded company secret of their respective operators and hermetically sealed off. However through an expert in mechanical engineering who had contacts to a supplier of a macro-facility for small companies, we ultimately still succeeded in getting a chance to inspect such a unit. After much deliberating, the decision was made to buy one of these machines.

In the meantime a further area of activity opened up for us, primarily through coincidence. A specialist company for recycling of precious metals gave us an order for us to grind electrical plugs containing gold at our site. The customer was so satisfied with the result that a 1-year contract was made. This made it clear to us just how important the recycling of precious metals actually is. Since then it has been an important element of our work to process and recover materials containing precious metals. Over the years we also continued to expand our trade in and disassembly of materials containing non-ferrous metals.

Yet at the start the difficulties were immense. There was hardly any specialist knowledge readily to hand, neither in the trading of metals nor in operating the granulation unit. In addition the competition employed extremely unfair means. It did not shrink from exploiting the initial lack of specialist knowledge and what was at that time an absence of contacts to serious business partners. Therefore we had no choice but to build up the company slowly, with a lot of time, patience and staying-power, while initially the profit we hoped for did not materialise.

Finally we succeeded in finding a processing company for what was by now 150 tonnes of insulation granulate.When the first larger consignments of products started coming in continuously, the unit proved to be too small for the many varieties of cable. We had no other option but to transfer the disassembly of the cable to two family businesses. One of these then took over our granulating unit with a firm acceptance of the quantity of cable and a commitment to take on the plastic ground material. Starting in 1991 the processing of the plastic was transferred to Pilsen (Czech Republic). In Replast we found a reliable, innovative manufacturer of recycling products, one which increased its product range over the years from seven initially to 72 products today. To this day we continue to supply Replast with processable plastic ground material. That is how the trade with plastic ground material began, for the purpose of reintroducing it to the production cycle and thus achieving 100% recycling of remnants of cable.

Today we are an enormously multi-faceted company, active in both the recycling of metals, cable and electronic waste and the trading of materials containing precious metals. In addition we offer both the disassembly of transformers and floor panels made of recycled PVC. In these activities priority is given to fair prices, satisfied customers, a good working climate and running the business in an environmentally-friendly manner.