Metals

Upstate Shredding plans heavy media plant addition

Upstate Shredding – Weitsman Recycling, headquartered in Owego, New York, has announced plans to build a heavy media plant at a recently purchased 3.5-acre site in Owego.

The site will include a complete dry media plant supplied by Florida-based SGM Magnetics to upgrade metal ranging from ¾ inch to 5 inches in size. The system is designed to process up to 15 tons of zorba per hour and can separate aluminum from copper, brass, zinc and stainless.

Upstate Shredding – Weitsman Recycling will feed the media plant with its two company-owned shredders—one located in Owego and the other in New Castle, Pennsylvania. The company says it also will purchase material from other shredder operators in North America.

The new plant, which will be enclosed in a new 20,000-square-foot building, is scheduled to be fully staffed and operational by the end of 2016, Upstate Shredding says.

Additionally, Upstate Shredding says it is installing a separate media plant at the new Owego location to sort the ¾-inch-and-under fraction of zorba using an alternate technology.

The project, which received a $1 million grant from Empire State Development, will cost $7.5 million, the company says.

LME nears final step on warehousing reform

The London Metal Exchange (LME) has announced its intention to introduce caps on maximum rates charged by LME-registered warehouses. The announcement follows what the LME calls “a marketwide consultation” and represents the final part of a three-year-long warehouse reform program “designed to enhance the LME’s warehouse network and to ensure that it fully serves the requirements of the global metals market,” the metals trading and warehousing organization says.

“We would like to thank all those who took part in discussions and consultations over the last three years, which have been invaluable in ensuring that we took the most informed and balanced action in refining our physical delivery network,” says Garry Jones, LME chief executive. “The LME has a duty to the entire metals community to run a fair and orderly market, and the action we have taken over the last three years has strengthened our ability to carry out this responsibility.”

As the final part of the reforms program, the LME says it will introduce an initial schedule of maximum rates for warehouse rents and free-on-truck (FOT) charges by calculating the average of the highest published charges for the years 2015-16 and 2016-17 on a per-metal and per-country basis. This schedule of charge caps will be frozen for five years, during which time “real-world” prices are expected to converge closer to the frozen published rates. After that, the maximum prices will be updated annually based on the per-country consumer price index.

The revised policy will take effect following the 90-day notice period required under the LME Warehouse Agreement, which means by Dec. 28, 2016.

Commerce Department finds China dumping stainless steel

The U.S. Department of Commerce has reached a preliminary determination that imports of stainless steel sheet and strip from China are being sold at less-than-fair value in the U.S. As a result, it says it will instruct U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) to require U.S. importers of stainless steel sheet and strip from China to deposit estimated anti-dumping duties at the time of importation.

Further, based on its previously announced preliminary affirmative critical circumstances determination, the Commerce Department will instruct CBP to require U.S. importers to post security equal to the preliminary anti-dumping rates on entries of stainless steel sheet and strip from China that were imported 90 days prior to the date of publication in the Federal Register of the affirmative preliminary anti-dumping duty determination.

The Commerce Department assigned a preliminary anti-dumping margin of 76.6 percent of the value of the imported stainless steel sheet and strip to Shanxi Taigang Stainless Steel Co. Ltd., the sole Chinese respondent that was subject to mandatory investigation. The Commerce Department established a preliminary anti-dumping margin of 63.9 percent for two Chinese entities with operations that the agency determined are not controlled by the government of China and, thus, were preliminarily determined to be eligible for a company-specific separate rate. In addition, the Commerce Department established a preliminary anti-dumping duty margin of 76.6 percent on imports of stainless steel sheet and strip from all other Chinese entities.

The Commerce Department’s determinations follow the filing Feb. 12, 2016, of anti-dumping and countervailing (or subsidy) duty petitions by domestic stainless steel sheet and strip producers AK Steel Corp., Allegheny Ludlum, North American Stainless and Outokumpu USA LLC.

Next the Commerce Department must verify the factual information submitted by the Chinese producer participating in the investigations and the Government of China. Parties will have the opportunity to submit case and rebuttal briefs to the Commerce Department and to participate in a hearing. Following these events, the Commerce Department will issue its final anti-dumping and countervailing determinations. The current deadline for the announcement of these final determinations is late November 2016, though it could be extended to late January 2017.

FPT buys two Sims yards

Detroit-based Ferrous Processing and Trading Co. (FPT) has announced its purchase of Sims Metal Management Detroit and Sims Metal Management Toledo in Ohio.

“Our purchase of these assets reflects our commitment to continued business growth in the Midwest region,” says Howard Sherman, CEO of FPT. “We are excited about these acquisitions and are happy to welcome our new employees in Detroit and Toledo to the Ferrous Processing and Trading team.”

The Sims Metal Management website describes the Detroit facility as having baling, shearing and torch-cutting processing capabilities while also offering truck loading, container loading, overseas container loading and rail car loading abilities.

The Toledo location is described as offering shearing and truck loading services with a concentration on industrial, obsolete and demolition scrap processing.

The sale marks the second recent selloff of United States assets by Sims Metal Management, which maintains executive offices in New York and Sydney. In mid-August 2016, Sims sold six facilities in Mississippi and Tennessee to the OmniSource Corp. subsidiary of Fort Wayne, Indiana-based steelmaker Steel Dynamics Inc. (SDI).

Two Chinese state-owned steelmakers to merge

The merger of two state-owned enterprise (SOE) steelmakers in China, which has been negotiated since June 2016, officially has been announced by the two companies after receiving approval from China’s State Council.

Shanghai-based Baosteel, the larger of the two firms and considered more profitable, is to take over Wuhan Iron and Steel (WISCO), according to an online report from BBC News.

The report says the merged firm will operate under the name China Baowu Iron and Steel Group, and its combined capacity of 60 million metric tons per year of steel output, if left intact, would make it the world’s second largest steel producer behind Luxembourg-based ArcelorMittal.

China’s central government has indicated that it sees mergers within its steel industry as a way to address the twin problems of excess capacity and red ink within the steel sector.