Liberty House unveils major international scrap venture

United Kingdom – The Liberty House Group has launched a metal recycling business – Liberty Metal Recycling (LMR) – as part of its bid to ‘create a competitive and sustainable steel sector in the UK’. Within five years, it says, the intention is for the business to be recycling ‘5 million tonnes of metal a year in the UK alone’.

LMR is aiming to develop a network of advanced collection and processing facilities for both ferrous and non-ferrous metals across the UK, the USA and Continental Europe. Prominent scrap industry figure Tom Bird, who has held leading positions with Sims and Van Dalen among others and who has also been president of the European Ferrous Recovery & Recycling Association (EFR), will head up the UK and US parts of the new enterprise as ceo. Meanwhile, Matthijs de Jong – formerly with Euro Scrap, TSR Recycling and the Alba Group – will lead the operation in mainland Europe.

Liberty intends the new business to be ‘free-standing and profitable in its own right’. The UK metal recycling business will supply the group’s growing integrated steel business in that country which, it says, ‘will be based increasingly on domestic scrap, melted in electric arc furnaces and powered by renewable energy’.

LMR plans to set up a processing centre at Newport in South Wales where the group already operates a one-million-tonne-a-year hot strip mill and where it aims to recommence liquid steel production from recycled scrap in the near future. In addition to Newport, the group will look to establish recycling centres in UK regions with high scrap metal generation and close to Liberty’s steel melting and rolling facilities. These regions are likely to include England’s South East, Midlands and North East, as well as Scotland.

Liberty will simultaneously develop its recycling business in the USA and in Continental Europe where it has already opened a scrap collection and trans-shipment operation in Gdansk, Poland.