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…

In 2023 the American Institute of Scrap Recycling Industries (AISR) decreed that there’s no longer such a thing as scrap. Henceforth it would be known as recycled steel. The 14th edition of ‘World Steel Recycling in Figures’ published by the Bureau of International Recycling (BIR) Ferrous Division followed their lead by replacing all use of…

Surely everyone knows what scrap is? Well, kind of. But we’re going to need to get technical… I want to focus on iron and steel scrap, so when I say ‘scrap’ that is what I am talking about. But already we have to think about stuff that might be mixed up with iron and steel…