Bringing Steel to Life
Few people ever see the fruits of our labor—the steel products that comprise the bulk of our business. But nearly everyone experiences how these products enable and enrich all facets of modern life. CMC products strengthen everything from the roads and bridges we travel on to the buildings where we live, work, play, learn and heal.
In short, CMC produces the steel that makes our economy strong and supports a sustainable way of living. Everyone on our team takes this responsibility to heart.
Never satisfied with the status quo, CMC is committed to constant improvement through innovation and investment. We continually invest in new and better processes for creating exceptional products, supporting our people, protecting our planet and elevating our communities. We pursue continuous process improvements with clear goals of optimizing our resource efficiency, environmental performance and cost savings.
A Pioneering Strategy
Recycle, produce, fabricate, repeat—our operations encompass the entire lifecycle of steel. In 1952, CMC raised the bar for our industry by becoming the first steel manufacturer in the U.S. to adopt the vertical integration model. We then adapted this approach to Europe.
Our vertically integrated model allows CMC to remain a producer of low-cost, high-quality steel, respond swiftly to changing customer needs and provide value to our investors.
In 2022, our vertically integrated manufacturing process kept more than 19 billion pounds of scrap metal out of landfills.
This process combines the recycling and processing of scrap metals with the melting of processed scrap into new steel and the fabrication of finished steel products. Our process includes four primary steps:
- Locally source, purchase and process scrap metal as feedstock, which allows us to lower emissions and put more waste to beneficial use.
- Melt the recycled scrap metal into new steel in our mills using our state-of-the-art EAFs, which allow for the use of 100% recycled content and consume less energy than traditional integrated steelmaking furnaces. This substantially reduces greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions.
- Roll the new steel into finished long steel products, including rebar, merchant bar, light structural shapes and other special sections, as well as semi-finished billets for rerolling.
- Fabricate the finished products into custom shapes and lengths for end use by our customers.
- Reclaim end-of-life steel material as feedstock for new steel products, thereby starting our cycle of steel production once again.
A Cycle of Efficiency
By virtue of operating as a vertically integrated recycling company, CMC is built on the principles of a circular economy. These principles allow us to realize a host of advantages, including:
- Reducing or eliminating waste and pollution
- Leveraging the natural resilience of steel, which can be recycled endlessly without losing its inherent properties
- Minimizing impacts on natural resources
CMC also incorporates the concepts of a circular economy in other areas of our operations, such as water recycling; beneficial reuse of process co-products, by-products and waste streams; promoting energy efficiency across our facilities; and expanding our use of renewable electricity.
What is the circular economy?
For most of our industrial development, economic activity has used a linear “take, make, waste” mode of production, whereby raw materials required as inputs are taken from the earth, used to make products, and eventually discarded, along with the pollution generated during the production and use of the product.
As populations grow and resource consumption patterns push against planetary boundaries, the circular economy model seeks to decouple the linear relationship between economic production and consumption of increasingly limited resources, such as energy and metals. Underpinning the circular economy’s approach to material utilization is a transition to renewable energy and materials.
The circular economy applies four key principles:
- Reduce: Decreasing the amount of material, energy and other resources used to create steel and reducing the weight of steel used in products.
- Reuse: Reuse is using an object or material again, either for its original purpose or for a similar purpose, without significantly altering the physical form of the object or material.
- Remanufacture: The process of restoring durable used steel products to as-new condition.
- Recycle: Melting steel products at the end of their useful life to create new steels. Recycling alters the physical form of the steel object so that a new application can be created from the recycled material.
Source: worldsteel
