Steel food and beverage cans and tin-plate offcuts, collected from municipal recycling and can-making plants. Low tin content matters because tin cannot be removed in the furnace.
Steel food and beverage cans and tin-plate offcuts, collected from municipal recycling and can-making plants. Low tin content matters because tin cannot be removed in the furnace.
Tin plate is thin low-carbon steel sheet coated with a very thin layer of tin. It is the material of food cans, aerosol cans, paint tins and can-maker offcuts. Post-consumer cans arrive from kerbside collection and sorting plants, baled or shredded; prompt tin-plate scrap arrives from can makers as clippings and skeletons.
Because the tin coating is unwanted in steelmaking, can scrap is either de-tinned chemically before sale or sold as a discounted grade that mills blend in small proportions. Shredded and incinerated cans from waste-to-energy plants are a further, lower grade.
De-tinning plants and steel mills with the capacity to take tin-plate are the buyers. Tin-plate scrap is traded within Europe, North America and East Asia and in containers to Indian and South-East Asian mills. Clean prompt tin-plate from can makers is the better grade; post-consumer cans are priced on how dry, clean and free of aluminium and organics they are.
Code: ReMA tin-plate and can scrap grades
The main importing countries for this grade — each links to the country page with its mills, smelters, price references and named firms.