Scrap Iron and Steel Industry

M }~ -UCH has been written about the steel industry. Little has been said about the scrap iron and steel industry. However, it supplies approximately one-half of the raw material of the steel industry. It thus ranks with pig iron as an immediate source of our steel products. In 1929, 3,447 establishments using 41,462,214 tons of pig iron required 39,120,989 tons of scrap metal in order to fulfill their orders. The value of the scrap amounted to $540,576,509 and the industry employed 150,000 men (Table II). The great importance of scrap to the steel industries lies in the possibilities of producing steel at a lower cost, as -well as producing a higher grade of steel at greater speed, than can be done with pig iron. That the steel industry has taken ad-vantage of these facts may be seen by the increasing growth of the use of scrap for the period 1919-1933 as shown by the ratio of Lake Superior iron ore consumed for every ton of iron and steel (merchant iron, plus steel ingots and castings) made in the United States. The ratio was 1.19 in 1919, 0.72 in 1933 (Table I). Ore producers attribute the reduction to the increased use of scrap. The scrap iron and steel industry is a fundamental part of our industrial structure

Business · Economics · Metallurgy · Natural resource economics · Scrap · Waste management · Engineering · Environmental Science · Iron and Steelmaking Processes · Materials Science · Metallurgical Processes and Thermodynamics

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