Total material requirement of scrap steel from end-of-life vehicle

In this study, the concept of total material requirement (TMR) has been introduced to quantify the recyclability of scrap steel from end-of-life (EoL) vehicle. The TMRs for the recycling of scrap steels (urban ore TMR, UO-TMR) from the EoL vehicle have been estimated for four cases; conventional press-method, shredder and separation method, additional recycling of scrap steel from automobile shredder residue (ASR) and all-recycling using the press method, and the trade-off between the increase in function of recycled steel (in other words, decrease in influence of copper as contaminant) and the additional inputs such as pig iron or nickel required to create the increase in function were evaluated. As the results, the estimated UO-TMR ranged 3.7~4.0 kg/kg and the factors of "material itself" and "melting" were dominant. The effect of ASR input into electric arc furnace aiming the all-recycling was found to be canceled by additional lime input and energy to heat glass materials. Considering the dilution process by cold pig iron, the shredder and separation method is most effective in terms of TMR. Further the effectiveness of both dilution process using pig iron and nickel addition to suppress surface hot shortness is discussed.