Cars, household appliances, civil construction rebar, food packaging or paints – virtually all discarded steel has the potential to be recycled and return to the steel industry as a raw material. The steel scrap value chain in Brazil is well established, but still has room to grow, especially with regard to packaging made from the material. Today, 47.6 % of them return to the industry to turn steel again, in a volume equivalent to 200 thousand tons per year.
Abeaço, the association that represents steel can manufacturers, wants to increase this index to 60% by 2031. To do so, it is supporting the creation of material collection centers and voluntary delivery points (PEV), in addition to training cooperatives for collectors to receive the material.
In 2012, the steel packaging industry invested R$ 1 million in Prolata Reciclagem, a recycling management entity formed by 12 companies to deal with the recycling and reverse logistics of these packages, as a strategy to comply with the guidelines of the National Solid Waste Policy (PNRS ).
Prolata receives packaging collected by 51 collectors' cooperatives, has warehouses for the disposal of large volumes in seven states and, more recently, has established partnerships with manufacturers and paint retailers to make PEVs available to consumers in São Paulo, Manaus and four municipalities from Baixada Santista.
“To achieve the goal, we need consumer engagement for the selective disposal of post-consumer cans. This is our current challenge”, says Thaís Fagury, president of Abeaço.
Prolata's model was developed after observing the strategy of countries with a high rate of recycling of steel packaging, such as Belgium (93% of cans returned to the industry) and Sweden, with an index of 83%. The material collected is negotiated directly with Gerdau, a partner in the project.
Among steel products, packaging takes the shortest time to return to the industry: about two years. Civil construction steel takes up to 50 years to be discarded and metal contained in automobiles takes around 20 years.
In addition to the so-called obsolescence scrap, which are steel products at the end of their useful life, steel mills are also supplied with industrial waste that arrives from the metalworking industry and scrap from companies that resell the material. The chain is well oiled, precisely because of the high value of steel scrap, which varies according to the region of the country, but can reach R$ 400 a ton.
“Brazil is an example in recycling, there is no steel scrap that does not have market value”, says Luiz Carlos Araújo Picone, national manager of Açovisa, a distribution company that works with long steel and carbon steel. Every month, the company produces around three tons of scrap from steel cutting shavings and iron filings, a volume that is all sent to steel companies such as Gerdau and ArcelorMittal.
The largest recycler in Latin America, scrap is an important source of supply for Gerdau: 73% of the steel produced is made from recycled material, transforming 12.6 million tons of scrap into new steel annually. “The recycling of ferrous scrap is today our main raw material, and this brings many advantages from an environmental and economic point of view”, says Débora Baum, manager of planning and marketing of metallics at Gerdau. The company's indexes are above the Brazilian average: the country processed 8.9 million tons of scrap in steelmaking processes in 2018, according to the Instituto Aço Brasil.
Fonte: https://clipping.cservice.com.br/cliente/viewmateria.htm?materiaId%3d43893119%26canalId%3d458662%26clienteId%3dSxnE%2bmhr%2fDY%3d%26newsletterId%3dxfTCQwMvcvw%3d
