It can seem that every steelmaker on the planet brags that steel is ‘infinitely recyclable’ – but is it? Well, yes and no. In one sense steel – or more accurately, iron – really is infinitely recylable. Nuclear reactions aside iron atoms are indestructable. It doesn’t matter how many times you roll, cut or cast…

Awesome, terrifying, and exactly what it says on the tin. Watch as recovered ship plates are cut, melted, extruded and stamped to become millions of nails. Fear, as workers jump and dodge thrashing lines of red hot metal. I’ve been trying to work out what the stats on steel recycling are including, and what they…

The recycling rate is the proportion of a material that is recovered and recycled. If 90% of steel cans are recovered and recycled after they have been used, then the end-of-life recycling rate for steel cans would be 90%. In a previous post ‘Unrecovered or unrecoverable? The fate of end-of-life steel’ I pointed out the…

Footballers are famous for “giving it 110%”. But can steel have 110% recycled content? Recycled content is the proportion of recycled material in a new product. If I am making steel cans, and half of the steel I use is scrap and half is made directly from iron ore, then the cans have 50% recycled…

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 average recycled content of steel today is around 31% . But steel’s recycling rate is estimated at 85%. What’s the difference? And which is the better measure? Simply put, recycled content refers to the proportion of scrap in the steel something is made out of. If I am making steel cans, and half of…

Pick any two reports on ferrous scrap, and the chances are that they will use three different words to describe ‘home’ and ‘internal’ scrap. If they use the terms home or internal scrap at all they will probably use them to refer to the same thing. Take the following examples: Home Scrap Internal Scrap: In…

Is the steel in the Titanic scrap? Or available for scrap? Is it unrecovered, or unrecoverable? We know roughly what end-of-life scrap is. It’s defined in ISO 20915: 2018 as ‘scrap from after the end of life of final products‘ (see ‘What is scrap?’). But that little word ‘after’ is doing some heavy lifting. Does…

If all the steel the world uses were made from recycled scrap, it would instantly reduce the world’s industrial carbon emissions by about 8%. That would be like India going net zero tomorrow. The technology to do this is more than 100 years old – so why don’t we? The short answer is that there…