The Liberty House Group (www.libertyhousegroup.com), which owns the Liberty Steel plant in Newport, has founded Liberty Metal Recycling (LMR)
to support its Greensteel strategy for renewable steel making. LMR will develop a network of collection and
processing facilities for ferrous and non-ferrous metals across the UK, USA and continental Europe.

It will be led by Tom Bird (previously of SIMS and Van Dalen), who will head up the UK and US parts of the new enterprise, while Matthijs de Jong (formerly with Euro Scrap, TSR Recycling and the Alba Group) will lead the operation in mainland Europe. LMR plans to set up a processing centre at Newport, where the group already operates a million-tonnes-a-year hot-strip mill, and where it aims to recommence liquid-steel production from recycled scrap in the near future.

There are further plans for recycling centres in regions that produce lots of scrap metal — and close to Liberty’s
steel-melting and-rolling facilities. Within five years, it is intended that LMR will be recycling five million tonnes of metal a year in the UK alone. It is expected to become free-standing and profitable in its own right, supplying the group’s steel business in the UK, which will be based increasingly on domestic scrap, melted in electric-arc furnaces and powered by renewable energy.