Americans still make lots of steel, mostly from scrap

A question about the collapsed Francis Scott Key Bridge — specifically, where will the steel come from to replace it? — got me to today’s Sun column: The state of Maryland should salvage as much of the FSK steel as possible, send it to modern mills, melt it down, refabricate it and use it to build the next bridge.

Bethlehem Steel is long gone. Steel is no longer made at Sparrows Point or any other point in Maryland. (There are companies that manufacture products made from steel, but no fabricators of primary steel.) 

And the whole process of making steel has changed. There are fewer than a dozen plants like the one with which Baltimoreans were most familiar, with blast furnaces that made steel from raw materials — iron ore, coal, limestone. Some 70 percent of the steel produced by Americans comes from about 100 mills with electric arc furnaces. These cleaner, greener furnaces melt millions of tons of scrap steel that come from junked cars and appliances, demolished buildings (and bridges). Depending on demand, U.S.-based companies provide anywhere from 70 to 90% of all the steel needed for domestic manufacturing and construction. 

Most of the new steel comes from old steel. It is recycled.

That’s what could happen to the scrap from the Key Bridge. It would take some organizing and planning; arrangements would have to be made to ship the pieces of the bridge being pulled from the Patapsco River to a specific mill that produces structural steel, then shipped back to Baltimore for the new construction, whenever that might be. But it would be worth doing — a high-profile example of recycling something lost into something new. It would symbolize our resolve and resourcefulness. Nobody asked me, but I think Marylanders and Baltimoreans would be proud of the project, knowing some — and maybe most — of the steel for the second bridge came from the first.

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