What do Peter Sellers and Kermit the Frog tell us about the recovery and recycling of end-of-life ferrous scrap?

Well, they’ve both recorded versions of music hall legend Harry Champion’s catchy 1911 classic ‘Any Old Iron’. Well worth checking out all their versions if you have a spare moment – links at the end of the post.

The Harry Champion version was recorded during the first world war, to solicit scrap for making artillery shells. But even I am old enough to remember the old rag-and-bone man with a horse and cart shouting for pots and pans in the south of England in the 1970s.  Door-to-door scrap collection was alive and well when I lived in Sao Paulo, Brazil in the 2010s.  And in 2022 the South African government imposed an export ban on ferrous scrap in an attempt to curb the theft of working rail and electricity infrastructure.

None of which suggests that a lot of readily recoverable ferrous scrap goes to waste.

The World Steel Association, worldsteel, estimated in 2020 that 85% of end-of-life steel worldwide is recovered and recycled.  The American Iron and Steel Institute and Steel Manufacturers Association (SMA) estimated that the recycling rate for steel in the US, including home, manufacturing and end-of-life scrap was around 80% in 2012, but had dropped to just 69% by 2019. In contrast, the SMA has suggested more recently that the rate might be as low as 50% in ‘developed economies’, based on a paper they commissioned in 2023.

The actual figure is uncertain, largely because it is hard to know exactly how much steel is contained in all the products reaching the end of their lives in use in any given year in any given country – let alone worldwide. And without knowing that, one cannot state with confidence what proportion of that steel remains unrecovered, and unrecycled. More posts to come on that.

But a quick look at UK data does not suggest that a 50% end-of-life recovery rate is likely to be remotely realistic.  According to UK Steel, the UK currently consumes or exports a total of about 10.5 million tonnes of scrap a year.  If half of that is end-of-life scrap, and the end-of-life steel recovery rate really is 50%, then the UK would be generating a total of about 16 million tonnes of scrap a year, of which 5.25 million tonnes is currently being left unrecovered.  That would mean that about one third of the country’s current annual steel consumption is left to accumulate as unrecovered scrap every year.

Which begs the question, if a 50% recovery rate is even close to correct – where is it?

All together now:

Any old iron? Any old iron?
Any, any, any old iron?
You look neat. Talk about a treat!
You look so dapper from your napper to your feet.
Dressed in style, brand-new tile,
And your father’s old green tie on.
But I wouldn’t give you tuppence for your old watch and chain,
Old iron, old iron.

(as performed by Peter Sellers, Kermit the Frog, and Harry Champion in 1911)