percent of recycled steel?

[vipereyes]

Hi all,

We are a spring and stamping facility, primarily for the automotive industry.

Recently two of our customers have requested that we provide the amount of recycled steel in the parts we supply to them, either by percent or weight.

Many times we purchase wire and flat stock for a particular job from different vendors, depending on cost and primarily delivery. Most of our material comes from "wire warehouses", so they may buy the same type of wire from many different places too.

Any suggestions as to how we can comply with their request?

Thank you

Kim

 

[swall]

You will need to track the material back to the producing mill in order to find out which mills are using electric furnace practice to make the steel vs the blast furnace BOF route. The former will be 100% recycled, the latter will have a very low level of recycled steel.

 

[EdStainless]

or you go to the AISI web site and look up the overall value for the industry.

http://www.recycle-steel.org/

Unless your customers are willing to pay for you to buy from specific sources they will have to settle for this.

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[TVP]

vipereyes,

I agree with swall that you should review the appropriate certifications with the warehouse/service center and track which steel mills are the original source. It is an automotive requirement to have mill traceability, and it does not add cost to merely request the original mill certification/documentation.

 

[vipereyes]

Thanks for the input everyone!

I do have access to the mill certs but they do not state the recycle content.

With my time constraints, I am trying to avoid researching each material purchase we made for a particular job, which could be hundreds, to see which company/mill we bought it from and then find out from each of them, the recycle content.

It's not that I'm lazy, but I can see weeks and weeks of research for this task. I was just hoping for an accepted industry standard that I could be use to estimate the recycle content.

Thanks again.

 

[EdStainless]

Maybe you could just do the research once. List your suppliers and then find out how they make steel.
If it is a pure EAF operation it is safe to use 99% for the number. You could always ask one of them just for verification.
The problem is that some of your supplier are probably integrated mills. Some of the steel come from blast furnaces via BOF. These heats will usually be about 25% scrap. These same mills though may also have and EAF shop, so you wouldn't know about a specific heat of material.

I would make the list and see how messy it is. If it looks straight forward try for real numbers, if it looks complicated try to run with the industry average number.

= = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = =
Rust never sleeps
Neither should your protection

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[TVP]

Ed's proposal is a pretty good one. Actually, if most of your spring wire comes from Japan and Korea, then you can safely assume that it has a low recycle content. Posco, Nippon Steel, Sumitomo, and Kobe all use BOF-type furnaces for their spring steel products.