Conclusion

Recycling metals, particularly the ferrous metals that are the subject of this article, is a practice as old as metallurgy itself. It soon became apparent that remelting a used object into metal saved energy and labor time, compared with extracting, smelting and reducing an ore.

Let's not forget that making a ton of steel by melting scrap (the electric process) costs 2.5 times less energy (8GJ vs. 20GJ), almost four times less CO ₂ (0.5t vs. 1.8t) and much less labor than a ton made by the cast-iron process.

In addition to these historical arguments, environmental motivations have been added, aiming to generalize the recovery of products at the end of their life cycle. This implies that the materials making up these products must be recyclable and recycled. This led to the introduction of a binding...