The steel frame of a new warehouse or a stretch of railroad track may have started as a pile of scrap. Steel Dynamics collects scrap across the United States and in parts of Mexico. It then melts the scrap in electric arc furnace mills (furnaces that use electricity to melt recycled metal) to make sheet, beams, rail and bars. It earns on the gap between what its steel sells for and what the melted metal cost. Smaller units make joists and deck (the steel beams and sheets that hold up floors and roofs). A new mill, still starting up, makes aluminum from recycled metal.
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