More and more metals are now being produced from recycled metals. Certain types of waste are resource pools for metal salvaging and recovery.
Industrial and household waste, obsolete vehicles and end-of-life products contain ferrous metals, as do wires, tubes, cables, storage cells, pipe assemblies, roofs and alloys, which also contain non-ferrous metals such as aluminum, copper, lead or zinc.
Collected from public authorities and companies, metal-containing waste is consolidated and transferred to a "scrap metal yard," a preparation facility that sorts, shears, torch-cuts and compacts metal-containing waste.
Prior to the above preparation, homogeneous batches of metal are sent directly to steelmakers, while the mixed batches are treated by a specialist responsible for separating the scrap, most of which will be reused to produce steel and non-ferrous metals.
In 2008, Veolia Environmental Services acquired Bartin Recycling Group, the third-largest scrap and metal recycling/recovery company in France. The acquisition brought our capacity to collect and recover metal materials in France to one million metric tons a year.
