Metals Recycling News
Steel appeal: Scrap 'wafers' satisfy bite-size and big-gulp appetites
AMM - American Metal Market
January 5, 2007
By Michael Marley
Forget factory bundles. In the not-too-distant future, scrap brokers and mill buyers might be bidding on "wafers" from the auto industry's stamping plants if A.G. "Chip" Hering, Ferrous Processing & Trading's resident tinkerer, has his way.
Hering, executive vice president of the Detroit-based scrap processor, has been promoting his company's new RamPress, a press equipped with hardware and computer technology to process sheet steel scrap at a stamping plant and package it into a form that pleases both integrated steelmakers and electric furnace based mini-mills.
This is accomplished by producing not a densified oblong basic oxygen furnace (BOF) bundle that measures about 2 feet by 2 feet by 4 feet, but by pressing the sheet steel offal into a wafer that looks more like a bale of old cardboard cartons. Key is the thickness of the so-called "wafer," which can range from 20 inches down to as little as 6 inches.
The thinner wafer is more attractive to many electric furnace melters, who have long complained that the big BOF-sized auto bundles can break the carbon electrodes in their electric furnaces—an expense to replace, not to mention lost production time.
The bigger factory bundles have been favored by integrated mills that typically bought most of the auto industry scrap and like dropping dense forms of scrap into their oxygen furnaces. Now, with more mini-mills in the flat-rolled business, the demand for prime steel scrap has spread. But mini-mills, both the new flat-rolled steelmakers and the older electric furnace mills that make bar and structural products, prefer looser forms of industrial steel scrap like No. 1 busheling. If they do buy bundles, they typically want them smaller—usually no larger than a 2-foot cube.
Ferrous Processing & Trading said it developed the RamPress to address this evolving electric furnace scrap demand while still serving the needs of integrated steelmakers. The patent-pending RamPress process can produce a high-density scrap "wafer" with dimensions of 3 feet by 5 feet and a thickness that can be adjusted automatically (and remotely) from 20 inches (BOF grade) to 6 inches (electric furnace grade), while an automated loading system loads outbound trucks or railroad gondolas with the maximum allowable weight to minimize freight costs.
Ferrous Processing & Trading developed its wafer-making RamPress about two years ago and has been using it to process steel scrap at Ford Motor Co.'s Maumee, Ohio, stamping plant, Hering said. Those wafers have found a home at a nearby electric furnace-based steel mill that never used factory or No. 1 dealer bundles in the past, he added.
