Much like other companies of other activity sectors in Québec, the ones pertaining to the aluminium industry are facing challenges associated with growth, labor supply and access to funding.
AluQuébec participates actively in different facilitating initiatives to help businesses remain competitive through the challenges faced. The cluster offers accompanying tools and information that cater to the common needs of businesses to support and simplify the establishment of structuring elements, essential to their blossoming.
AccESs TO FINANCING
By remaining on the outlook for financial support programs, AluQuébec rapidly informs the businesses constituting the Cluster of the available funding assistance. AluQuébec works to compile and classify information to support businesses in finding financial assistance in all phases of their development, facilitating the manufacturing of innovating and exportable products.
Table of financing programs available in Québec (in French)
Guide to Export Support Organizations in Quebec / Support services and Financing
Productivity and innovation (4.0)
To help businesses develop winning commercial practices and increase their competitive advantage in a constantly evolving economical context, AluQuébec participates in initiatives lead by different organizations of the ecosystem, notably Transal. It remains vital for AluQuébec to:
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Ensure a support to the technical challenges linked to aluminium caused by the digital revolution;
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Promote relevant information to the industry's actors;
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Participate in bearing initiatives in partnership with the responsible instances.
Workforce
Labor represents a significant challenge for a number of Québec businesses and the ones in the aluminium industry are no exception. In doing so, AluQuébec put in place activities especially destined to generate interest in the succeeding workforce.
Structure-Al Challenge
This competition offers university students of first, second and third year of engineering, architecture and design fields, their first opportunity to integrate aluminium in the construction and the building sectors. In multidisciplinary teams, the students from different universities around Québec have four days to conceive and virtually dimension a built element (ex. : building, shelter, etc.) that conjugates originality, credibility and innovation while meeting predefined standards, such as the integration of a given percentage of aluminium.
Alu-Compétences
This major project aims to produce and broadcast technical and scientific content relating to aluminium, for academic teaching at either colleges or universities, with the collaboration of numerous organizations or associations working in the aluminium and the academic sectors in Québec.
AluQuébec, via its Centre d’expertise et d’innovation sur l’aluminium (CeiAl) aims to contribute to the training of highly qualified personnel since being a vector of development in the aluminium-processing industry.
Furthermore, AluQuébec participates (on an ad hoc basis) to the works of the Table de concertation en adéquation formation-emploi in the aluminium industry and is associated with certain activities of the CSMO-M and RTMQ, in particular to promote metallurgy trades amongst the futur professionals.
Valorization and recycling
The aluminium sector is a key player in circular economy, in the material’s traceability and in its valorization, all along its value chain. Furthermore, the challenge of aluminium’s recovery, with the purpose of recycling, is deemed important by many stakeholders.
AluQuébec facilitates, initiates and supports the development of promising actions to encourage the reuse, the recycling, and any action aiming to obtain, from industrial scrap, reusable materials to put forth aluminium’s life cycle. It is in that optic that AluQuébec put in place, in 2020, the Valorization and recycling of aluminium working group.