International steel and commodities business Liberty House Group has announced its plan to enter the UK’s ferrous and non-ferrous scrap markets.
Yesterday (10 October), Liberty House Group announced the launch of Liberty Metal Recycling (LMR) which it claims is targeting the development of close to 5 million tonnes of processing capacity in the UK within five years.
Liberty operates a number of steelmaking sites across the UK, including at Dalzell in Scotland. The new recycling business will target sites close to its steel melting and rolling operations
According to Liberty, LMR will seek to develop a network of ‘advanced collection and processing facilities’ within the UK, USA and continental Europe – with former Van Dalen UK and Sims managing director Tom Bird to head the company’s UK and US operations.
The UK metal recycling business will supply the Group’s integrated steel business, which will be based increasingly on domestic scrap melted in electric arc furnaces, Liberty said.
Initially LMR plans to set up a processing centre at Newport, South Wales where the Group operates a one million tonnes-per-year capacity hot strip mill and where it aims to start up liquid steel production from recycled scrap.
Facilities
LMR is also targeting the development of scrap recycling sites in regions of ‘high scrap metal generation’ and close to Liberty’s existing steel melting and rolling facilities which are likely to include the south east, midlands, north east and Scotland. The company has yet to reveal if the expansion will involve the acquisition of existing scrap metal processing sites, or new developments.
Commenting on the establishment of LMR, Liberty House executive chairman, Sanjeev Gupta, said: “The projected growth in the supply of scrap in the UK and in other developed economies over the coming years provides the basis for a strong, competitive and sustainable steel industry for the future. The fact that we have recruited two of the most prominent and accomplished individuals in the global metal recycling industry shows how serious we are in delivering on this vision.”
Europe
Liberty will also be developing its recycling business in the USA and on continental Europe where it has already opened a scrap collection and trans-shipment operation in Gdansk, Poland. Matthijs de Jong, formerly with Euro Scrap, TSR Recycling and the Alba Group, will lead the operation in mainland Europe.
On the steel production side Liberty House operates steelworks at Dalzell and Clydebridge in Scotland, which it acquired from Tata Steel following the company’s announcement that it would be divesting its UK operations earlier this year.
The Group had also proposed the development of an electric arc furnace for processing scrap metal at Tata Steel’s Port Talbot site when it was put up for sale earlier this year (see letsrecycle.com story) – but the future of the site has yet to be decided.
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Source: letsrecycle.com Metal
