Steel landscape steady in US

Steel production figures in the United States, while not soaring, have been steady or gently rising in several recent weeks. The price of ferrous scrap, meanwhile, has taken a leap upward as measured by just-released MSA Inc. Raw Material Data Aggregation Service (RMDAS) transaction figures.

On the scrap side, mill buying transactions from Feb. 20 to March 19 (as tracked by RMDAS) show the value of ferrous scrap rising by from $31 to $100 per ton, depending on the grade and region.

Prompt grades were the big gainer in March, with RMDAS showing U.S. mills paid an average of $86 more per ton for prime scrap and $100 per ton more in the RMDAS North Central/East region.

The obsolete heavy melting steel (HMS) grade rose by a comparatively smaller $31 to $40 per ton, depending on the region. Shredded scrap, meanwhile, gained $50 per ton in value nationally and $63 per ton in the North Central/East region.

Demand from U.S. mills might not be surging, but output figures gathered by the Washington-based American Iron and Steel Institute (AISI) portray its steadiness.

In the week ending on March 18, 2023, steel production in the United States was 1.686 million tons. The figure is up 0.5 percent from the prior week. It also represents the second straight week that output has risen, and it has risen in three of the last four weeks.

Year-to-date steel production in the U.S. through March 18 stands at 18.2 million tons. That is down 4.7 percent from the 19.1 million tons made during the same period last year, but it consists of a set of weekly figures that closely match output in the fourth quarter of 2022.

Combined with reasonably steady export demand (even after Turkey’s earthquakes), the stable U.S. output means mill demand could be outpacing disappointing scrap supplies.

“Inbound [scrap flows] from peddlers and industrial accounts continues to be soft, and flows have been bad since October,” a recycler in the Great Lakes region told Recycling Today in early March. “I believe most [scrap processors] would agree that inbound volumes are off 20 to 33 percent.”