Why We’re Going to ALUMINIUM Dusseldorf This October

This year, Golden Aluminum will be in Düsseldorf, Germany for ALUMINIUM 2026, the industry’s leading trade fair, taking place October 6 through 8 at the Düsseldorf Exhibition Centre. This biennial edition is organized around a theme that fits us well: “Sharing a Vision.”

ALUMINIUM 2026 is expected to bring in more than 30,000 visitors and around 1,000 exhibitors from nearly 50 countries. Like the industry as a whole, the show is likely to center on conversations about sustainability, recycling, the circular economy, and the broader transformation underway across aluminum production. Those are things we think about constantly at Golden Aluminum, and they’re a large part of why we’re making the trip.

Four Decades of Continuous Casting

To understand how all of this connects, it helps to go back a few decades. Golden Aluminum’s Fort Lupton, Colorado facility has been operating since 1983, built on the then-unproven idea that recycled aluminum beverage cans could be cast continuously into high-quality sheet. We backed that belief further in 1987 by partnering with Lauener Engineering, the company behind the original blockcasting system. Over the decades that followed, that machine became one of the most successful continuous casters in the world, running reliably for over 40 years and producing over a billion pounds of aluminum along the way.

Nexcast®, our newest casting technology, grew out of that history. Co-developed with SMS Group, it takes everything we learned running that original system and applies it to a more advanced line. For most of the industry, continuous casting means choosing between speed and cost on one hand, and the ability to run high-value alloys on the other. In practice, that means most continuous casters simply can’t handle heat-treatable, high-magnesium grades, the kind of sophisticated alloys that packaging, automotive, and other demanding applications increasingly require. Producers needing those alloys have typically had to fall back on conventional ingot casting instead, at the cost of a larger footprint, more energy, and more capital. Nexcast® was built to close that gap. Benchmarked against the conventional process, Nexcast® delivers a 90% smaller footprint, uses 25% less energy, and requires 40% less capital cost, all without giving up the capability to run sophisticated, high-value alloys.

Proven in Production

Nexcast® produced its first hot-rolled coil on July 5, 2025, just four weeks after installation began, and reached full production capacity within its first month. It has run successful 60-hour casting campaigns and handled on-the-fly alloy changeovers involving high-magnesium AA5182. It’s been in commercial operation ever since.

Our original block caster wasn’t holding us back. It was efficient, it was capable of running what our customers needed, and it proved that for four decades straight. So when we talk about Nexcast® internally, we’re not talking about fixing a compromise we were living with. We’re talking about modernization. Taking four decades of operating knowledge and applying it to a system built for where the industry is headed next.

Find Us in Dusseldorf

This is what’s taking us to Düsseldorf. SMS Group will be showcasing Nexcast®, and we’ll be there alongside them, as the team that’s been running this technology in a real production environment since last summer. It also reflects something we’ve believed for a long time: that the industry moves forward faster when real advances don’t stay siloed. That’s part of why we made Nexcast® available to select partners earlier this year. Sharing a vision is how we do things.

If you’re attending ALUMINIUM 2026 and want to talk about what next-generation continuous casting could mean for your own mill, we’d welcome the conversation. Find the SMS Group team on the show floor, or reach out anytime here -> Contact Us