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Project

Cleanscrap - a road to optimised valorisation of ferrous based scrap (CLEANSCRAP)

Metal, and ferrous metals in particular, are rightly regarded as one of the best recycled and recyclable materials. But there is room for a next step. Today, ferrous metals are collected en masse and reintroduced into the material cycle, but with still too little attention to sound selective recycling and reuse.

Shredders often use compacting or shredding as a first step, as a result of which ferrous metals with valuable alloying elements are mixed with unalloyed steel. On the other hand, there is a lot of painted and coated steel that returns to the recycling process and can only be melted down to a limited extent because of the risks of VOC emissions and emissions of volatile elements such as Zn. It is ecologically and economically more interesting to separate these specific flows and link them to individual users. New technological developments in the field of sorting, more accurate analysis techniques and the social driving force for the complete closure of all material cycles, offer the right platform to take that extra step today.

This applied research will focus both on optimising the processes of scrap sorting and purification and on mapping the exact material flows between the various producers, collectors and processors.


The main objectives are:

- Raising awareness of the value of certain alloys and their elements and the impact of certain coatings on recycling.

- To test and sensitise the metal processors on low cost & fast analysis techniques to improve scrap sorting.

- Mapping of Flemish companies with valuable "waste streams" of ferro-alloys and Flemish users of (high-alloy) ferro-alloys and linking them in order to have the waste stream of one (possibly after conditioning) serve as input material for the other. Some metalworking workshops have chip waste made of high-alloy or stainless steel alloys or, more recently, recovery of powders from the 3D printing sector for foundries that use these alloying elements.

- In the coated steel sector, developing a process that can remove the coating selectively, economically and environmentally, so that both scrap and any by-products can be valorised.

- Economic evaluation of the material flows between the various players on the market.

 

This project focuses on Flemish companies active in metal collection, metal processing or metal (re)use, in other words:

- Metal processing companies & workshops

- Scrap dealers

- Scrap processors

- Metal producers and foundries


Date:1 Apr 2018 →  31 Dec 2020
Keywords:recycling, ferrous metals, scrap, selective, material cycle, shredding, alloying elements, emission
Disciplines:Metals recycling and valorisation
Project type:Collaboration project
Results: