At the Ferrous Division meeting at the BIR (Bureau of International Recycling) Convention taking place in Valencia, Spain, on May 26-28, 2025, divisional president Shane Mellor from Mellors Metals Ltd. announced that they will soon publish the 16th edition of their World Steel Recycling in Figures paper.
In this document, covering the 2020-24 period and written with the cooperation of multinational accounting company KPMG, they will give an “holistic overview” of recycled steel usage in global crude steel output. Preliminary data show that recycled steel usage points to huge savings every year, in terms of emissions, energy consumption, water and land usage, as well as raw material usage.
During the session, the panelists stressed the importance of using the term “recycled steel” instead of “steel scrap”, as it better conveys the key role of this raw material for the steel industry. Just to give a general idea, China’s crude steel production in 2024 amounted to 1,005.1 million mt, with recycled steel usage of 209.67 million mt. In the US, recycled steel usage for steel production amounted to 55.3 million mt in 2024, whereas in the EU-27 it amounted to 76.642 million mt for 129.5 million mt of steel production in the same year. In Turkey, recycled steel usage totaled 31.273 million mt in 2024.
In this scenario, Turkey remains the world's largest recycled steel importer, mainly from the US (4.533 million mt), the Netherlands (2.766 million mt) and the UK (1 million mt).
According to Frank Pothen, professor of economics at the University of Applied Sciences in Jena, Germany, in order to make the steel industry aware of the value of the usage of recycled raw materials, it is pivotal to convert its ecological benefits into monetary figures. Based on the data showed*, recycled steel contributed to savings of approximately €30-115 billion alone in terms of greenhouse gas emissions avoided.
In addition, compared to DRI production based on green hydrogen, the use of scrap - recycled steel - lowers electricity demand, while it can be used with already existing technologies. Although it is hard to make predictions, Prof. Pothen claimed that post-consumer scrap availability will slowly but steadily increase at a yearly pace of 1.6 percent from 2010 to 2050. Based on his studies, however, he said there are three possible scenarios of evolution for scrap demand, which are based on the three factors that establish the demand, i.e., the amount of steel produced, the composition of the steel production route, and the recycled content of the steel production route.
In the first scenario, recycled steel demand will increase according to its availability. In the second scenario, it will remain stable, and in the third scenario it will decrease. It is interesting to note, however, that from 2015 to 2023, scrap availability and scrap consumption were following a parallel downward trend with figures from 2023 at the bottom, while the data from 2024 are not available yet.
Prof. Pothen concluded by saying that there are many factors that might influence recycled steel demand in the future, such as global steel production evolution, the regional composition of steel production, the entry of new production routes, and market protectionism. In this situation, he noted, artificial intelligence will have a more and more relevant role for the recycling industry.
*Referring only to the EU-27 and Turkey