Ferrous

UNRELENTING HEAT

Much like the furnaces in which it is melted, ferrous scrap is in a heated atmosphere, with anxious buyers found throughout the chain.

Scrap dealers, after lowering their scale prices in January in response to lower purchasing prices being offered by mills, saw flows weaken temporarily, according to recyclers.

Several weeks later, after mill buying prices had moved back up, flow was being described by one Midwestern scrap buyer as "maybe 75 or 80 percent" of a peak flow rate.

"I’m reluctant to admit it, but a higher price doesn’t necessarily bring more scrap out any more," he comments. "There is not much scrap in the big dealers’ yards, I can assure you. And when the earlier peak prices had people going down into [coal] mines to retrieve old equipment, where else am I going to get it?"

A recycler in Texas also says flow is healthy and recovered in March from the lull caused by the January attempt to push prices back down. "When they dropped prices in January, I thought that was exceptionally stupid," he comments. "It just stopped the flow from the remote spots that might be 50 or 60 miles from the nearest shredder yard. And when auto wreckers see a drop, they’ll just hold on."

(Additional news about ferrous scrap, including breaking news and consuming industry reports, is available online at www.RecyclingToday.com)