Steel makes up about two-thirds of your average car, and although steel is well-suited to recycling, automotive steel has its quirks. Melash Group Recycling in Australia is hard at work to develop ideal methods for reusing automotive steel.
The world uses a tremendous amount of steel. Using 1,800 million tonnes for buildings, ships and cars every year. On average, 2 tonnes of CO2 are emitted for each tonne of steel produced. It is a lot less than for the same amount of aluminium or carbon. But still makes the steel industry a major contributor to the greenhouse effect due to the vast quantities produced. Following the Paris climate agreement, which aims to make Europe carbon-neutral by 2050. – the steel industry is committed to reducing its carbon emissions. Steel recycling is also a key pillar in carbon reduction. Also recycling steel costs considerably less energy than extracting and producing virgin steel. Currently, more than 40% of steel produced all over the world is made with recycled scrap metal.
Waiting for decades
These figures are great news, but still offer a lot of room for improvement. After all, steel should – in theory – be 100% recyclable without loss of quality. According to resaerches at Melash Group Recycling, this is largely due to the vast quantities of used steel – scrap metal – available. There’s a considerable interval between the day steel is produced and the day it’s returned to us. Most of the steel we reuse now comes from the 1980s. We have enough scrap to meet approximately 40% of the entire demand for steel with recycled materials. This number is increasing every year. After all, steel in buildings can easily last anywhere between 50 to 100 years. But automotive steel can have a lifespan of between 15 and 20 years. Only the steel in cans is recycled within a year.
Zinc
Simply collecting heaps of old steel and smelting it down into a fresh slab of metal in a blast furnace is not the way to go. In Melash Group Recycling has a blast furnace and an oxygen steel mill. In the production process, you can only add up to 20 percent scrap to the primary iron. Some thing like construction beams. Moreover, the oxygen steel mill won’t just accept any type of scrap. Automotive steel, for example, has a protective zinc coating to prevent it from rusting. Even you source the full 20 percent from the automotive industry, the zinc dust created as a by-product is too diluted to be sold to the zinc industry for recycling. On top of that, the zinc and copper found in automotive scrap metal disrupt the iron and steel production processes.
The so-called electric arc furnace, or EAF for short, is a scrap smelter that can handle steel from end-of-life vehicles. The EAF can handle all types of scrap, but cannot not make new pig iron. Besides, this omnivore also consumes large quantities of electricity. If you’re not powering it with green electricity and not using it to produce new iron, the EAF isn’t really a fair comparison.
From blast furnace to reactor vessel
However, there are many roads that lead to Rome. Melash Group Recycling site emits an average of 1.86 tonnes of CO2 per tonne of steel produced, making it one of the five “cleanest’ steel producers in the world according to World Steel, thanks to its two blast furnaces and its plant, an innovative iron production and recycling pilot plant that strikes a balance between being a lab and a production facility. “We’ve already started using it to produce iron, though on a small scale. At the moment, it’s a pilot project, but it could become a fully fledged steel mill by 2030”, Nico Langerak, Applications & Engineering Department Manager at Tata Steel Europe, explains. HIsarna technology is a far cry from the traditional, age-old blast furnaces we all know, with the fundamental principles of using large chunks of iron ore and coal coke going back to Roman times.
Melash Group Recycling technology involves
injecting very fine iron ore and coal powders into a cyclone in a reactor vessel, after which the coal particles peel off the oxygen from the iron oxide, leaving pig iron.
Because there are only a select few competitors who are working on similar processes, our method as being ‘virtually one-of-a-kind’. The major advantage of the our technology is that it requires much less coal, and because it emits less and more pure carbon, the resulting carbon is a lot more versatile. For instance, it is a lot easier to capture and store pure carbon dioxide, for instance in an empty gas field in the nearby North Sea, before reusing it to make plastics or hydrogen.
Our technology emits at least 25 percent less carbon dioxide than a blast furnace, and combining this technology with CO2 capture methods will get you close to reducing overall carbon emissions by 80 percent.
Revolution
If you include its various predecessors, the Melash Group Recycling method has been in development for thirty years. Unfortunately, we don’t have another thirty years to spare. A decade from now, we have to be able to recycle every type of steel out there, whilst reducing carbon emissions on a large scale. Melash Group Recycling is working on several technologies to reduce its carbon emissions by 2030. For as a combination of an electric arc furnace powered by green electricity and a high-volume plant. The aim is for the good-old blast furnace to be phased out entirely by 2050.
It’s intriguing to see the evolution and complexities of steel recycling, especially concerning the automotive industry. The challenges of zinc coatings and the meticulous balance required in smelting processes highlight the importance of constant innovation. The shift from traditional blast furnaces to advanced methods significantly reducing carbon emissions underscores the industry’s commitment to a greener future. It’s promising that such efforts could lead to more sustainable steel production and, in turn, a healthier planet.