Scraponomics Episode 111: A Method in the Madness
“Though this be madness, yet there is method in’t.” — William Shakespeare, Hamlet
If you look at the outdoor area of Friedland, you’ll see different piles of metals throughout the property.
Why are they separated like that? Why not bunch them all together?
Great question!
The answer lays in the different processes that need to happen to those metals before they can be re-melted, and their respective values as commodities.
Let’s look at the difference between Sheet Iron and Steel Turnings.
Sheet Iron is the large pile of scrap you see when you drive by; the one that contains appliances and whatnot. The general rule with Sheet Iron is that it should be at least 70% steel, whereas the remaining 30% can still be residual plastic, rubber, wood, etc.
That material still needs to be shredded before it can be re-melted. After the shredding process, the resulting fist-sized nuggets of steel is what gets re-melted into new steel.
Steel turnings, on the other hand, are the shavings that are left over when a manufacture makes a new product. In our processing plant, turnings look like a pile of dirt. Don’t let that fool you, though. They’re a valuable commodity.
Turnings may not have plastic or rubber on them, but they usually contain a leftover mineral coolant from the manufacturing process. Because of this, they need to be placed on liquid containment pads and drained before being sent to a mill for re-melt.
My point is, Sheet Iron and Steel Turnings may both be steel, and thus may be versions of the same commodity. But because different things have to happen to them before they can be re-melted, they ultimately have different values, and therefore need to be separated in our plant.
Pretty cool, eh?
The deeper you dive into scrap-processing, there is, indeed, a method in the madness.
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