Recycling steel blast furnaces

Feedstock recycling process, other than liquefaction, involve large-scale basic industrial equipment, blast furnaces and coke ovens for iron and steel applications and ammonia plants for gasification. Thus, their recycling process can be evaluated as a pretreatment for such basic industries. Actually, no chemical treatment is performed in the blast furnace application at present. 

Limiting demand for them is clearly one way of approaching this problem but it may not be practicable if competition, which stimulates demand, is intense. Since many materials can be recycled, this is an alternative, or indeed complementary, approach. Some materials have been recycled for many years, ferrous metals being perhaps the most notable examples. Thus at the end of their useful life automobiles are crushed and the (rusted) metal returned as part of the feed to the blast furnace where it is reconverted into iron and steel. Paper and cardboard are other well-known examples. 

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