Recognized at the Premio Euskadi Agenda 2030

It is not the kind of moment you forget.

What the Premio Euskadi Agenda 2030 is, briefly

The award was created by the Directorate of Social Innovation and Agenda 2030 of the Basque Government, and it is managed by Fundación EUSKALIT. Its purpose is straightforward: to recognize organizations that integrate the Sustainable Development Goals into how they actually run themselves, not as a side project, but as part of the management system.

There are five recognition levels: Konpromisoa, Bidean, Aurreratua, Jardunbide Egokiak, and Eragin. We received the Eragin level. In Basque, “eragin” is a verb. It means to influence, to drive, to set something in motion. The noun derived from it, “eragina”, means influence. It is the word the Basque Government chose to name the recognition that goes to organizations whose work generates measurable social and environmental influence.

In our case, that influence has a number behind it. And the number belongs, honestly, to our customers, who run the plants. Our role is to engineer the equipment that makes the number possible.

1.6 million tonnes is not abstract

It is the figure that emerged when we measured what GHI furnaces actually do, every year, in customer plants. It was calculated using the Eraldatzen framework, a methodology for measuring industrial impact developed under the umbrella of the Eraldatu initiative, with support from the Basque Government.

Aluminium recycling matters because of a property the metal has and most metals do not. It can go through the loop again and again without losing what it is. The challenge is that scrap is rarely clean. Modern furnace engineering is what stands between dirty, mixed, painted, oily aluminium and a clean ingot ready to enter the next product cycle.

That is what we have been engineering since 1937. The recognition we received yesterday is, more than anything, a recognition of the customers who chose this path with us.

Auditable, by design

One of the things we appreciate about the Premio Euskadi Agenda 2030 is that you cannot just declare your way into it. Recognition follows a process: a self-assessment on the platform built by EUSKALIT, an external review by the EUSKALIT Evaluation Club, and validation against a published framework aligned with the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals.

For us, two SDGs sit at the center of how we measure what we do:

• SDG 9. Industry, innovation and infrastructure.
• SDG 13. Climate action.

The factors used in our calculations come from public, auditable sources: IPCC 2006 for emission factors, EPA and European Environment Agency for the equivalences. We can defend every number we publish because we did not invent the methodology. We applied the one a third party designed.

The other six on stage

An award like this is not a podium. It is a community. The other organizations recognized at the Eragin level alongside us are doing serious work in their own fields. We mention them because what we share is a methodology, a region, and a bet on integrating sustainability into how an organization is actually run.

• A&B Laboratorios de Biotecnología
• Garlan
• Ingeteam
• Grupo Lacor-Ibili
• Okin
• Sutargi

What comes after the recognition

Awards are useful when they push you to do more, not when they let you sit. We are using this moment to deepen the work we have been doing on measuring, publishing, and improving the actual numbers behind every furnace we engineer.

If you operate an aluminium recycling plant, or you are evaluating one, the question we want to leave you with is the one we ask ourselves: what is the methodology behind the numbers you are using to make decisions? If the answer is “we calculated it ourselves”, that is honest, but it is not enough. Auditable methodologies exist. Eraldatzen is one of them. There are others.

We will keep publishing what we measure, with the framework that supports it.

See what we measure on our decarbonization page →