The Inherent Recycled Content of Today’s Steel
This instructive paper, published by the Steel Recycling Institute, provides an overview of the methods used to produce steel in North America today, and describes steel’s inherent recycled content. Though its facts and statistics are specific to the North American market place, it provides valuable information on today's steel recycling practices.
Contemporary technologies produce steel in two ways, both of which require old steel to make new: 1)The basic oxygen furnace (BOF) process uses 25 to 35 percent old steel to make new. It produces products—such as automotive fenders, encasements of refrigerators, and packaging like soup cans, five-gallon pails, and 55-gallon drums—whose major required characteristic is drawability; 2) The electric arc furnace (EAF) process uses more than 80 percent old steel to make new. It produces products— such as structural beams, steel plates, and reinforcement bars—whose major required characteristic is strength.
Many are surprised to learn that steel is the world’s, as well as North America’s, most recycled material, and in the United States alone, almost 73 million tons of steel were recycled or exported for recycling in 2006. This is done for economic as well as environmental reasons. It is always cheaper to recycle steel than to mine virgin ore and move it through the process of making new steel. However, it should also be clearly understood that many steel applications are durables, and even though two out of every three pounds of new steel are produced from old steel, the fact that cars, appliances, and bridges last a long time makes it necessary to continue to mine virgin ore to supplement the production of new steel.
Economic expansion, domestically and internationally, creates additional demand that cannot be fully met by available scrap supplies. Unlike other competing industries, recycled content in the steel industry is second nature. The North American steel industry has been recycling steel scrap for over 160 years through the growth of 1,800 scrap processors and some 12,500 auto dismantlers. Many of them have been in the business for more than 100 years.
The pre-consumer, post-consumer, and total recycled content of steel products in the United States can be determined for the calendar year 2006 using information from the American Iron and Steel Institute (AISI),the Institute of Scrap Recycling Industries (ISRI), and the U.S. Geological Survey. Additionally, a study prepared for the AISI by William T. Hogan, S.A., and Frank T. Koelble of Fordham University is used to establish pre- and post-consumer fractions of purchased scrap.
Individual company statistics are not applicable or instructive because of the open loop recycling capability that the steel and iron industries enjoy, with available scrap typically going to the closest melting furnace. This open loop recycling allows, for example, an old car to be melted down to produce a new soup can, and then, as the new soup can is recycled, it is melted down to produce a new car, appliance, or perhaps a structural beam used to repair some portion of the Golden Gate Bridge.
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Source: Steel Recycling Institute
