Leading steelmaker Tata Steel said it has ventured into the scrap business with a unit at Gurgaon.
Mr. Anand Sen, president (total quality management & steel business) of Tata Steel announced this at the Asia Steel-2018, an international conference jointly organized by the steel company and the Indian Institute of Metals.
“We intend to make our scrap business reach a turnover of Rs 1000 crore over the next three to five years”, he said.
Tata Steel foraying into the scrap business augurs well for the Indian steel industry. Nearly 60 percent of the steel in USA is produced from scrap. Other key producing nations like China, Japan and South Korea also deploy state-of-the-art technologies to produce steel from recycled scrap.
Hideki Murakami of Japan-based Nippon Steel and Sumitomo Metal Corporation said at the conference that it is easy to recycle steel as tramp elements in steel are overwhelmingly less compared to other metals. In contrast, recycling of aluminium is difficult and original quality is not maintained due to the presence of a number of tramp elements, Murakami said.
Speaking at the conclave, Union steel secretary Aruna Sharma also stressed on the need to recycle steel scrap. This step, she believes, can cut dependence on iron ore and also leads to more cost-efficient way of steel manufacturing.
“A joint venture has been forged by Mahindra with MSTC on scrap. The first unit has started operations at Noida. We are going to generate a lot of scrap and this scrap will go into steel making”, Sharma said.
It seems Tata Steel is reviving its scrap recycling venture. In 2011, the steel company had said it was looking at acquisitions in steel scrap recycling in South East Asia and will continue to invest upstream to increase its self-sufficiency in raw materials.
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