Upgrading of Post-Consumer Steel Scrap

Post-consumer steel scrap resulting from End-of-Life Vehicles (ELV), Waste from Electric and Electronic Equipment (WEEE) and Incineration Bottom Ash (IBA) is often hand picked for copper, stone, cloth and other contaminants, in order to meet the specifications of the steelmakers. At capacities of 20 t/h of scrap or more, the efficiency of hand sorting generally becomes problematic, hence, leaving half of the copper in the steel product. New technologies are presently being proposed to facilitate or even eliminate hand sorting of these types of scrap, allowing operators to increase revenues from copper, expand plant capacity, realize a higher and more consistent steel product quality or avoid legal constraints associated with hand pickers. A shape-sensitive magnetic separator called “Clean Scrap Machine” (CSM) pre-sorts the scrap into a bulky thin-walled steel fraction of consistently high purity and a volumetrically much smaller flow of relatively heavy parts in which the contaminants are concentrated. The latter flow can either be sorted by a much smaller number of hand pickers, by sensor sorting, or it can be sold directly to specialized sorters to extract the copper. Detailed results are reported for mid-sized IBA scrap.

Keywords: Steel scrap, Recycling, Hand picking.