Tuesday, 30 July 2019

Scrap metals: How they are reused to make new products?

Scrap metals which are generated abundantly from modern consumerism tend to be dumped in landfills or discarded away. Scrap metals may have toxic chemicals and hazardous elements in them so it is imperative to keep them away from landfills by recycling them where there is a danger of those metalspercolating into the environment which could cause soil pollution. Thus scrap metals must be used so that they don’t end up polluting the environment.

Aside from the environmental factor, reusing scrap metals such as copper, aluminium, brass, steel, and iron has economic benefits. It drastically reduces manufacturing costs as recycled metals can be used over and over again leading to a ‘circular economy'.
Some of the areas where reusing scrap metals can be effective are as follows:

1. Manufacturing: As mentioned before,  scrap metals helps to significantly reduce the cost of raw materials for the manufacturing plants. But other than that, the  scrap metals can be used to produce different alloys afterthe melting process..

2. Construction: From roads, bridges to buildings materials, reusable and production surplus scrap metals are used in a variety of ways in the construction industry. Scrap metals like iron, stainless steel and aluminium are used on a common  basis.

3. Packaging: Steel and aluminium are typically used for new food packaging. Canned items usually consist of certain out amount of recycled scrap metal with few being manufactured  entirely of scrap metal.

4. House furnishing: A typical house presents a lot of avenues for scrap metals to be reused. Appliances, lighting, metal roofing, etc., gets manufactured  using alloys that are tcomposed of scrap metals. Furniture like lamps, chairs, tables etc. all, are containing alloys that are composed of recycled metals owing to their durability.

5. Transportation: The bodies of ships, aircraft, and automobiles among others are the modes of transportation, manufactured using alloys produced from recycled scrap metals.
Thus, we can see that recycled scrap metals find a variety of applications and thus they must be recycled to conserve the environment as well as make manufacturing cost-effective. Scrap metals have a lower boiling point than virgin ore and thus can be easily melted and land would not be dug up to extract non-renewable metal ores which up the risk of environmental pollution.

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