A steel industry cash grab
The steel industry should be told to go away and think again here. Even, told with a little Anglo Saxon language sprinkled around. This is a cash grab, nothing more and nothing less:
Metals recyclers are at loggerheads with the British steel industry over a call to limit lucrative scrap exports so steel can be reused by UK furnaces.
Why’s that then?
UK Steel has asked ministers for limits on exports to countries outside the Organisation of Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD). Members of this bloc of wealthier countries can “demonstrate their ability to treat waste sustainably”, it says.
However, at the moment four of the top five destinations for UK scrap metal are non-OECD countries, according to the BMRA. In practice, many poorer economies would be unlikely to be able to prove environmental credentials.
Ho ho.
The UK - as with all rich nations - produces steel scrap. The poor nations consume steel scrap. The background to this is that building out a civilisation for the first time uses a lot of steel. Building civilisation 2.0, or 3.0, uses less steel in the building than is gained by dismantling that civilisation 1.0 (or 2.0) that is being disassembled to make room for the new. This is just a simplicity of the world. Rich countries are natural exporters of steel scrap that is.
The claim here is that those poor countries might not handle the scrap with the same excessive tweeness that we will do here. Ignoring, wholly, that producing the steel those poor countries need is vastly less environmentally damaging when made from imported scrap than if produced new from iron ore and coking coal.
The actual desire is that these UK furnaces should not have to pay the world price for their steel scrap. Rather, they should get a special, low, price as produced in a scrap producing country without the ability to export the surplus. This is, obviously, a theft from those disassembling the old version of society and a transfer of that cash to those steel mills. Everyone knocking down a building gets less cash for the old rebar*, every steel mill using scrap within the UK makes a higher profit. The correct answer is Anglo Saxon off.
Really, nice try laddies now off you go. If you cannot pay world prices for the scrap you desire then you shouldn’t be using scrap now, should you? If you cannot operate without using scrap at prices stealing from everyone else then you shouldn’t be operating at all.
Tim Worstall
*It is a standard of a demolition contract that there’s a price for doing the job. Everyone knows that the scrap metals are worth something. So, the revenues from the sale of the scrap get knocked off the price of the demolition.