O.K. but it's still not clear what the ratio of steel that is made from raw mined materials and steel made from recycled material actually is for automobile manufacturing.
Most if not all steel produced today contains some recycled content. It is in the mill's financial interest to charge the furnace with scrap material. My engineering alloys textbook from 1981 cites the same 30% BOP and 100% EAF numbers for recycled material as your wiki article. They've been recycling steel for a long time.
Follow me here on something though:
Third sentence, second paragraph of your wiki article: "Steel does not lose any of its inherent physical properties during the recycling process, and has drastically reduced energy and material requirements compared with refinement from iron ore."
Recycled steel is not "lower quality." The source article for the statement, "This steel contains greater concentrations of residual elements, ..." that you are using to claim that recycled steel is lower quality, and therefor not suitable for the auto industry, is at least 7 years old (source cited in 2009), and the link (
https://www3.epa.gov/epawaste/conserve/materials/steel.htm ) no longer works. I can't confirm anything from the original article. But, I suspect the source info is even older, 10 years or more.
The reason copper, nickel, and molybdenum end up in recycled steel, is those elements are used for alloying in many steels (the HSLA steels I mentioned in a previous post). You've probably heard of "chomoly" steel. That is the AISI 4100 series HSLA, alloyed with chromium and molybdenum. These steels are hard to distinguish from plain carbon without a chemical/spectrographic analysis, so they get lumped in with other scrap material as simply steel. But the presence of these elements actually produces a higher quality steel. The HSLAs are more expensive. But as is with all alloys, there is a trade off, in this case ductility is lost in favor of increased strength. But the loss of ductility (malleability) means that the forming processes are limited. You're going to have to heat less ductile materials, and that carries a cost. Cold formed is cheaper. Hence, that's what the auto industry uses, and less ductile materials aren't suitable.
But enter a new(ish) technology; the handheld alloy analyzer.
http://alloytester.com/xrf-alloy-analyzersI first saw one of these ~7-8 years ago. Since then every scrap yard I know of is using these to pull out higher value alloys to resell at a better price. These devices pay for themselves in a few weeks of use at any scrapyard. All scrap yards segregate specific alloys today.
Anyway, the reason for the roundabout post is to point out that I suspect the recycled material is much better controlled today by segregating the specific alloys. I'd bet that the problem as cited no longer even exists.
