When quality doesn’t diminish,
even after centuries
Why recycling steel scrap makes sense
Our oceans are drowning in plastic waste. Every year, up to 12 million tons of plastics end up in the oceans. This costs the lives of tens of thousands of animals. A plastic bag takes 100 to 200 years to decompose. One plastic bottle takes 450 years. A car tire takes 2,000 years. And a glass bottle requires more than 4,000 years to be decomposed by nature. So how we deal with the things we need for our everyday lives is important. And it plays a big role how long we can use them.
Every DIY enthusiast knows that wooden parts that have been used in a house can only be burned during renovation or demolition. Something new can hardly be created from this. Other building materials – such as plastic from window frames – are either very difficult to reuse or cannot be reused at all. Where recycling is done, only a certain proportion of recycled old material is usually used later, together with new materials. This is because loss-free recycling is very rare.
Even the ancient Romans knew the problem
The situation is different with steel. Because steel production is very costly, steel products have always been recycled. Even in ancient Rome, scrap was melted down and recycled. Later, in the Middle Ages, old armor, weapons and other metal objects were melted down and reused to make new weapons and armor. And in the construction of the new One World Trade Center in New York, steel from the previous World Trade Center buildings destroyed in the attacks of 11 September 2001 was used symbolically.
How sustainable business practices work
Steel is needed in almost all industrial value chains – even where it is not used in the end product. In 2015, for example, 8.3 kilograms of steel per resident were used to produce food. Steel and iron scrap is the most recycled raw material in the world. It enables more than one billion tons of primary raw materials to be saved every year. But not only that: studies have shown that only half as much energy is needed to produce steel from scrap steel as from ore. And the best part is that the quality of the steel doesn’t suffer – no matter how often it is melted down and recycled. After just six recycling cycles, one ton of steel can be turned into more than four million tons of steel products. Prof. Matthias Finkbeiner from the Technical University of Berlin has verified this “multi-recycling”.
Recycling that makes a difference
Because steel can be used over and over and over again, significantly less material is consumed. And in addition, it produces considerably fewer greenhouse gases and other negative effects on the environment. The Fraunhofer Institute has calculated that between 2011 and 2015, 117.4 kilograms of carbon emissions were cut per inhabitant and per year. Steel recycling also reduces the consumption of water as well as the amount of waste. With Pure Steel+, too, steel is recycled to the highest quality instead of being turned into waste. Depending on the quality required, an average of 20 to 25 percent steel scrap is used in the converter process at the Dillinger and Saarstahl steel mills. And the trend is growing. Even old car tires are given a new lease on life: we use scrap tire cord in production. And for Saarstahl Rail’s “green” rails, scrap steel from various railroad networks is melted down in Saarstahl Ascoval’s electric arc furnace and formed into rails in Hayange. Sustainability is also practiced in other areas. For example, blast furnace slag, a by-product of hot metal production in blast furnaces, has long been used to build roads and produce cement. Pure sustainability. Pure commitment to our environment.