With the price of scrap metal being at an all time high I was just wondering what they really do with it? Do our new Mondeos, Citroens, BMW's come from the metal of a scrapped Mk2 golf or an old peugeot 205? With so many new vehicle manufactured daily how many have been manufactured from recycled metal?
Cheers
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It's all shipped to Germany so that it can be turned into Mercedes Benz cars.
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You beat me to it, though my guess was France and Renaults!
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I did hear, seriously though, that a lot of crushed car metal is shipped from the north by boat to places as far away as Japan where it *is* recylcled and processed into new Japanese cars.
Failing that when I open my next tin of beans, it could be the wing off a BMW 330!
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It all goes to make fighter planes and destroyers. Got to help the war effort, don'tcha know?
Haven't eaten stewed rhubarb since grandmother's saucepan went into a Lancaster bomber, along with the church railings and father's garden fork....
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we got our railings back about 10 years ago complete with new wall
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If it's a ship, it used to go to the Far East, Korea possibly. Soon after the Herald of Free Enterprise affair I saw it in the Canaries with the name painted out, on the way east. But it was probably going to remain afloat as ferries are not so tightly regulated there?
Nowadays I suspect much steel scrap goes to China, as do many other bulk commodities - not least oil, of course. I wish they would take away the rusty mountain in Widnes ...
Edited by Andrew-T on 21/09/2008 at 15:39
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Fifties Bentleys ('standard steel saloons') could rust quite badly around the wings and rear wheel arch. I was told by a specialist RR fettler/dealer that the steel used in their manufacture, although quite thick and presumably the best that could be obtained, rusted more easily than the pre-war stuff because it had a much higher scrap content and therefore contained impurities. And it's true that I don't remember ever seeing a badly rusted thirties one.
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As I have recently been taking scrap to the local scrap dealer, he sends all the pre too-clever by half electronic controlled engines as complete as he can to India (still a big market for those Indian mend and make do guys apparently).The other scrap goes to China where they turn it into everything and sell it back to us mugs as poor quality shoddy goods.
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China where they turn it into everything
It goes to China because what is left of our steel industry doesn't want it and can't cope with it. China has a vigorous tin-bashing sector that can swallow any amount. Nothing wrong with that is there? It's just business.
and sell it back to us mugs as poor quality shoddy goods.
Surely a fair return for all the poor quality shoddy goods, Indian opium and so forth we, or our representatives, sold to China over the last couple of centuries? And I'm not sure Chinese goods are all that shoddy compared to goods from elsewhere. A lot of computers are put together there.
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A short list of the shoddy goods from Chine I have purchased in the last six months
Panasonic microwave - turntable not rotating due to one wire missing from motor
Cieling fan again wire missing from fan
Castors had retaining rings missing so when first used fell apart
Awning foot prints on cannopy- crossthreaded screws on cannopy arms
Various computer parts returned due to failure
Curtain rail ends fell of when fitting - welded ends not tacked properly
Flush light fittings with CE mark caught fire
Flush cieling light fittings - electrician refused to sign of electrics as he had recently had fires caused by them.
There is more shoddy rubish from China I have returned but not listed ,talk to any trades person they have the same opinion of this rubbish we are accepting unfortunately everything you buy seems to come from China
Edited by Dynamic Dave on 21/09/2008 at 20:15
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Go to any scrap metal recycling centre and watch the endless line of 20 foot containers go in and out, they go in empty and come out full with 26 tonnes of scrap normally heading for a ship that is heading East!
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I sometimes go to SIMS metal, and most seems to be shredded and loaded onto containers on railway trucks. I heard that it mostly goes to china as the ships which come here with all their exports need to carry a certain amount of weight back as ballast, sending them back with anything in is better than empty, which is why they often take back rubbish that people have put into recycling bins.
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The heavy engineering firm that I work for, did away with its own foundry many years ago. They now purchase raw castings by the container load from India and China. Approxiamatly a third of every batch will be rejected as scrap by quality control, yet it still works out cheaper than sourcing from europe...I often wonder how many of these castings were once Rover 45's & MK1 Mondeos etc.
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70s Italian cars earned their reputation as rustbuckets because the extreme left Italian govt of the day bought squillions of tons of steel from their Comrades in the soviet Union, who in turn had smelted down tons of obsolete weapons, and captured german ships, Panzer tanks etc etc etc
Unfortunately there were so many impurities in the steel after the process that the stuff was rubbish.
Anybody who ever experienced the AlfaSud (an attempt to start a bit of industry in the south of italy, hence the Sud) will tell you that they started rusting from day #1, and were sieves by year 3 - even in these sunny climes!
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im sure it would be worth it to save all your recycled cans these days rather than give them to the council after youve sorted them out for them, all you need is a magnet and some strong sacks and a can crusher, ally in one steel in tuther then weigh them in just before car tax time!
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Italian cars were reputed to rust badly as a result of the high proportion of scrap metal in them.
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So is it possible to refine scrap metal back to pure?
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Yes, to the extent that anything can ever be pure. But it's a question of cost I think. Getting the last traces of impurities out costs a fair amount. So metal is sold that is adequate for purpose but inclined to corrode easily. It is much the same I believe when smelting metal from raw ore.
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>>So is it possible to refine scrap metal back to pure?
In fear of sparking a whole new metallurgical debate, relatively few metals are used in their pure, unalloyed state, and the processes for taking scrap to produce the popular, relatively weak grades of steel are well optimised.
The specifications for the basic steels are so widely toleranced, that with good control, a steel can be dual certified, i.e., made so it complies with more than one specification.
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Yes NC. But industry standards as we all know aren't always the same and aren't always as good as they might be.
In the thirties, as I indicated above, when bean counters (let us not think: Number Crunchers) didn't control industries to the extent they do now, better quality steel used to be used sometimes, more or less accidentally... I would imagine the scrap content of new steel plate tended to rise throughout the 20th century, and the quality to decline and improve, often reaching appalling troughs embodied in late-fifties Vauxhalls and things...
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>>better quality steel used to be used sometimes
Effectively, this still happens.
A typical cheap structural grade being S270 - where the yield stress of the steel must be above 270 MPa. If, however, you test some S270, it's not unusual for the yield stress to be significantly higher than this - which normally, in general structural use is a good thing. Where it's a bad thing is if it gets used in a structure which can be subject to impact - then, the extra strength actually reduces the crashworthiness of the structure.
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As a student I used to retain all my empty beer cans, I had planned to melt them all down and build a Dyson Sphere.
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