Region's manufacturing base understands value of recycling
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Steel, an industry that may forever be linked to Pittsburgh, was an early adopter of recycling. Today, more steel is recycled, by volume, than any other material.
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Pittsburgh has always been a green city, it's just that for the industries that have been strong here, green as in environmentalism, lined up with green as in cash.
Steel and aluminum, two of the traditionally strong industries in Pittsburgh, were early adopters of recycling, because it was cheaper to melt down old products to make new products than it was to go out and mine the raw materials.
"What you and I call junk yards is the original recycler," said Bill Heenan, the president of the Steel Recycling Institute.
The process of making steel has included recycled steel for the last 150 years. Anyone alive during World War II remembers the metal drives in which people would donate their old pots and pans to make guns and tanks for the boys overseas.
It's not just pots and pans that are making it into new buildings and bridges. Cars, refrigerators, washing machines and even parts of Three Rivers Stadium have been used to build buildings and bridges across the country.
More steel is recycled, by volume, than any other material.
This gives Mr. Heenan a slightly skewed vision of America because while the rest of us look at the Golden Gate Bridge as an engineering marvel and an architectural beauty, "we look at the Golden Gate Bridge as scrap and inventory," he said. "Eventually, we'll get it back."
US Steel doesn't just recycle old steel into new appliances, the company uses the waste gas that is generated in the baking of coal into coke in Clairton as fuel for two other plants in the Mon Valley Works: the Edgar Thomson Plant in North Braddock and the Irvin Plant in West Mifflin. That gas contains about 500 BTU's of energy or half the power of natural gas.
That big pipeline that runs from Clairton up to West Mifflin and North Braddock "is a very large recycling program," said Courtney Boone, a spokeswoman for US Steel. "When you reduce your energy, you reduce your environmental presence."
Kennemetal in Latrobe also is reducing it's carbon footprint, its waste and the amount of water it uses as part of it's Protecting Our Planet program. It is also looking to the lower level energy uses and changing the corporate culture to save electricity by turning off lights and computers.
First Published March 16, 2010 12:00 am
