Metal Recycling

Why sorted scrap metal won’t end up tossed in the landfill..
Scrap metal has been salvaged and reused since the early ages of metal working. From both an environmental and economical standpoint, recycling metal is extremely effective. Metals such as steel, iron, aluminum, and copper can be recycled an infinite number of times, because their metallic properties do not deteriorate with repeated melting and casting. With plastic and glass recycling so much more difficult, it’s important to remember that recycled metal is a traditional foundation of a lot of metalwork.

The metal recycling industry specializes in retrieving metal from obsolete objects so that scrap metal does not end up in landfill sites. Instead, it is converted into raw materials for new products.

There are three main categories of scrap metals:

Home scrap
Home scrap refers to the trimmings, pigged metal, and rejects generated during mill or foundry production. This type of scrap has known chemical properties, and is easily combined with other raw materials and reprocessed on-site.

Prompt scrap
Prompt scrap is generated during the fabrication of metal products. Much like home scrap, the chemical properties are known, and quickly returned to the mill for reprocessing.

Obsolete scrap
Obsolete scrap is recovered from sources such as end-of-life automobiles, appliances, farm equipment, structural metal, and ships. The chemical properties of obsolete scrap are largely unknown—the source materials may have been in use for decades, or previously recycled and mixed with other materials. Obsolete scrap must be sorted and processed before it can be used.