Editor’s Note
This article reports on a municipal urban planning commission granting Cunext permission to expand its copper smelting facilities, a move aligned with the company’s strategic plan.
The licensing commission of the Municipal Urban Planning Management (Gerencia Municipal de Urbanismo – GMU) granted Cunext permission this Wednesday to expand its facilities located in the Parque Joyero, its copper smelting industrial complex. This initiative is part of the group’s strategic plan.
In this plan, the Cunext group envisions an investment of 68 million euros to carry out a series of actions at its Córdoba factory. These consist of the construction of new facilities, the acquisition of state-of-the-art equipment, and the digitalization of production processes compatible with Industry 5.0 for the generation of green copper and tinned copper.
The Cunext group specializes in the transformation of copper and aluminum, and is also present in sectors related to the transmission of energy, data, or signals, with applications for the automotive and railway industries, wind farms, industrial motors, home appliances, telecommunications, or construction. This strategic plan included the installation of a photovoltaic park, the construction of new industrial buildings, a logistics area, and the building of a parking area.
Cunext’s latest major project for Córdoba is the construction of a new green copper plant. The new plant will be located on the Granada highway, 3.5 kilometers from the urban center of the capital of Córdoba, on a plot of 309,500 square meters. Here, more sustainable copper will be produced thanks to the use of scrap as raw material. The Cunext group, which plans to start construction in December, is the reference supplier in the manufacture of copper and aluminum materials for the transmission of electrical energy, data, and signals.
The project means that 50% of the raw material will come from copper scrap, which signifies that the plant will transform 100,000 tons of scrap into “maximum quality” copper.
The virtue of the mineral is that it can be recovered as many times as necessary without losing properties, but until now it was not recovered in this way. Thus, the new plant will manufacture Grade A copper cathodes (with a copper content of 99.99%) from recovered materials (scrap), thanks to which a large part of the primary copper (from mining) currently used as raw material for the manufacture of rod (an intermediate product used for manufacturing copper products) can be replaced.
But the investment does not stop there, because to be able to prepare the scrap, the company will invest another 100 million euros in the facility it already has in Córdoba. Therefore, the total investment reaches 220 million euros to achieve the circularity of the raw material, which currently arrives by ship from Africa and South America.
With all this, they claim that the Córdoba factory “will be able to produce the most sustainable copper cable, with the lowest carbon footprint in all of Europe,” key for strategic industrial sectors such as automotive, especially in the manufacture of electric cars; the transport industry or the electrical industry, both in forms of conventional energy and renewable energies. The new factory will also have electric trucks and will be associated with a self-consumption photovoltaic plant of around 20 megawatts.
The number of jobs would rise to 80 people, with the intention of growing as the facilities “gain maturity.” Profiles associated with engineering or machine operators will be needed, all qualified jobs. Currently, the company directly employs about 500 people. The talent, for now, comes from abroad, mainly from Finland, Germany, and Asia, who “will have to come to Córdoba to train.” The dimensions of the necessary land are very large, about 31 hectares, so it could not be installed in the existing plant, located in an urban growth area of the city, nor in any of the industrial estates that Córdoba has, whose plots do not meet these characteristics.
The implementation has an urban planning process that consists of extraordinary actions, as defined by the new Lista Law, which are those linked to the circular economy and local development. The processing started in the Local Government Board of the Córdoba City Council, which declared it of Local Strategic Interest.
