What Happens to Recycled Steel and Metal
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Steel and other ferrous metals are among the easiest materials to separate from mixed waste, since they respond strongly to magnets, allowing sorting facilities to pull them out of a mixed stream quickly and reliably, without needing the more complex optical sorting required for many plastics.
Once separated, scrap steel is typically melted in a furnace and reformed into new steel products, a process that uses considerably less energy than producing steel from raw iron ore, since much of the energy intensive refining has already been done during the metal's first production cycle.
Because steel does not lose its structural properties through repeated melting and reforming, it can be recycled essentially indefinitely, which is part of why steel recycling rates tend to be consistently high compared with many other materials, aided by the simple, reliable way it can be separated from other waste. A tin can placed correctly in recycling has a genuinely good chance of becoming another can within a fairly short time.