But we have landfills which are full of great raw materials. I would argue that it is easier to collect steel from a landfill than from a mine during the industrial revolution.
Collect, yes. But those materials, at the end of the consumer use cycle, are definitionally about as far as possible from raw. Having collected this scrap steel, how do you propose to smelt it efficiently for reuse with little or nothing that burns hotter than the local hardwoods? That's the question actually being asked.
I believe you can work some grades of steel tolerably with manual, bellows-fired forge processes, but not all of it will still be the same kind of steel when you finish (decarburization, etc), some you won't be able to meaningfully hot work at all, and you likely won't be reliably able to produce pieces much beyond the quality you could get in bloomery days - forgings and hot working would benefit from well-chosen scrap of compatible metallurgy, but everything would tend over time to rehomogenization into something between wrought iron, and what we would now call low- to medium-carbon mild steel.
That's far from nothing, you can do at least as much with it as our ancestors did, but it also isn't close to anything we'd call "modern." Between the relatively
enormous energy inputs required to do any meaningful hot working and the relative scarcity of materials no longer being manufactured, tools and objects made of iron would probably come to be family heirlooms again for more than sentimental reasons: replacing your hipster thrice-great-grandfather's cast iron might indebt you the equivalent of half a year of your struggling truck farm's proceeds.
(It is still called a 'truck farm.' No one knows why. The old missus in town who reads says it has to do with some of the old machines, but even she doesn't try to pretend she ever saw one of them move, so no one thinks much of that. But all the village, not only the half or so she's midwifed, is happy to grant her her modest notions.)
"Not raw" is actually generally an advantage, as it's possible to sort through landfills to find directly-usable materials, or those which can be fed to an electric arc furnace (presuming that level of sophistication), or a charcoal-fed blast furnace.
This isn't great, mind you, but it's a good start.
Steel has a relatively high melting point. Other metals, notably aluminium and copper can be worked at far lower, far more attainable temperatures.
Keep in mind that modern steelmaking really doesn't begin until the Bessemer process (1860s), and that was far more predicated on high-volume, high-quality fuels (anthracite coal) than it was in the input iron ore grade. Knowledge of and access to liquid oxygen, far better process (and temperature) controls, and improved metallurgy, through the 19th, 20th, and 21st centuries have advanced smelting and fabrication even further.
NB: "Truck" means to barter or trade. A "truck farm" is one on which cash crops (rather than those for local consumption) are grown, usually vegetables rather than staple grains (wheat, maize, rice).
throwanem|11 months ago
I believe you can work some grades of steel tolerably with manual, bellows-fired forge processes, but not all of it will still be the same kind of steel when you finish (decarburization, etc), some you won't be able to meaningfully hot work at all, and you likely won't be reliably able to produce pieces much beyond the quality you could get in bloomery days - forgings and hot working would benefit from well-chosen scrap of compatible metallurgy, but everything would tend over time to rehomogenization into something between wrought iron, and what we would now call low- to medium-carbon mild steel.
That's far from nothing, you can do at least as much with it as our ancestors did, but it also isn't close to anything we'd call "modern." Between the relatively enormous energy inputs required to do any meaningful hot working and the relative scarcity of materials no longer being manufactured, tools and objects made of iron would probably come to be family heirlooms again for more than sentimental reasons: replacing your hipster thrice-great-grandfather's cast iron might indebt you the equivalent of half a year of your struggling truck farm's proceeds.
(It is still called a 'truck farm.' No one knows why. The old missus in town who reads says it has to do with some of the old machines, but even she doesn't try to pretend she ever saw one of them move, so no one thinks much of that. But all the village, not only the half or so she's midwifed, is happy to grant her her modest notions.)
dredmorbius|11 months ago
This isn't great, mind you, but it's a good start.
Steel has a relatively high melting point. Other metals, notably aluminium and copper can be worked at far lower, far more attainable temperatures.
Keep in mind that modern steelmaking really doesn't begin until the Bessemer process (1860s), and that was far more predicated on high-volume, high-quality fuels (anthracite coal) than it was in the input iron ore grade. Knowledge of and access to liquid oxygen, far better process (and temperature) controls, and improved metallurgy, through the 19th, 20th, and 21st centuries have advanced smelting and fabrication even further.
NB: "Truck" means to barter or trade. A "truck farm" is one on which cash crops (rather than those for local consumption) are grown, usually vegetables rather than staple grains (wheat, maize, rice).
<https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/truck%20farm>
(And I'm realising you're painting a picture of a future in which etymological knowledge is scarce, just thought I'd answer that question.)
ink_13|11 months ago
dredmorbius|11 months ago
But not in the sense of quantities available from traditional coal mines, or oil/gas wells, no.