Recycled-content aluminum producer Pennex Aluminum Corp. hosted Congressman Bill Johnson at its Leetonia, Ohio, plant in late January. Local media coverage of the event indicates capacity at the Leetonia extrusion plant recently has been expanded, and the firm has hired 50 more people as result.

Wellsville, Pennsylvania-based Pennex operates one aluminum casting plant and one extrusion plant in Pennsylvania plus the extrusion plant in Leetonia, which is in eastern Ohio.

On its website, Pennex indicates “all Pennex products contain over 80 percent recycled material.” A report on the recent Congressional representative’s visit by WKBN-TV indicates the extrusions made in Ohio are “for use in a number of industries, including the battery packs for electric vehicles.”

Its website also states, “From casting billet through extruding custom shapes to fabricating finished components, Pennex services a wide range of aluminum extrusion markets to include automotive, transportation, building and construction, electrical and machinery, consumer durables and distribution."

Pittsburgh-based United States Steel Corp. has reported a $680 million net loss in the fourth quarter of 2019, wiping out gains it had made earlier in the year.

For the year, the steelmaker has reported a net loss of $642 million. The 2019 loss compares with full-year 2018 net earnings of more than $1.1 billion.

In addition to reporting the quarterly loss, in remarks accompanying its results U.S. Steel says it “expects the first quarter of 2020 to be the trough for the year due to the normal seasonality of our mining operations and lower first-quarter shipments in flat-rolled [steel] as the company prepares for the April blast furnace outage at Gary Works” in Indiana.

Despite the losses, U.S. Steel David B. Burritt says the company is on track with a major investment and repositioning plan. “We are pleased to deliver better than expected results to end the year and are excited to turn the page to 2020, where we will continue to transition the business toward our future,” he states.

He continues, “2019 was a year of notable strategic progress, and we took swift action to reposition the business.” He adds, “We achieved $75 million of run-rate fixed cost reductions, we demonstrated flexibility by adjusting our 2020 capital spending to prioritize strategic investments, and we de-risked strategy execution by raising $1.1 billion of incremental capital.”

In the year ahead, Burritt says the steelmaker “will take another step toward our world-competitive, ‘best of both’ strategy [as] we complete two important strategic projects: the electric arc furnace (EAF) at Tubular and our XG3 AHSS investment at our PRO-TEC joint venture.”

The investment in scrap-fed EAF technology is being made in Fairfield, Alabama, in U.S. Steel’s Tubular Division, while the PRO-Tec project involves a steel galvanizing facility in northwest Ohio.

Burritt also lists the U.S. Steel investment in Arkansas EAF steelmaker Big River Steel as a priority that ties into a U.S. Steel future where, “We won’t be the biggest steel company, but we will be the only ‘best of both’ steel company.”

The company’s “best of both” strategy refers to achieving a balance of maintaining its integrated or basic oxygen furnace (BOF) capacity along with growing its EAF capacity. (For additional information on that investment, see "Joining forces" in our January 2020 Scrap Metals Supplement.

Ashland, Kentucky-based Braidy Industries has announced that Chairman and CEO Craig Bouchard is stepping down from those positions. President Tom Modrowski has been named interim CEO, and Charles Price has been named the new board chairman at Braidy Industries.

Braidy Industries describes itself as entering its “final fundraising stage” as it builds a $1.7 billion aluminum alloys plant near Ashland. (A 2019 Recycling Today interview with Modrowski about the project can be found here.)

According to a Braidy press release, Bouchard will remain a member of Braidy Industries’ board of directors. “Tom [Modrowski] and the board will continue to focus our efforts on completing fundraising and planning for construction of the Ashland mill,” says Price.

The company describes new board Chairman Price as a native of Kentucky and a successful entrepreneur who “is well-positioned to focus the company on the completion of the aluminum mill initiative in Ashland.”

The new President Modrowski has been with Braidy since its inception and has more than 30 years of experience in the metals business, including senior roles at various metal and metal processing businesses, according to Braidy.

The company adds, “Site planning work and fundraising continues unabated for the first greenfield aluminum rolling mill in the U.S. in more than 37 years. The 1.5 million square foot complex will use state-of-the-art technology to serve the rapidly growing needs of the transportation industry.”

However, the leadership change has added to scrutiny the project is receiving from some media organizations in Kentucky. That scrutiny largely started when former Kentucky Gov. Matt Bevin pledged $15 million in state taxpayer dollars to become an investor in Braidy Industries.

The scrutiny has intensified as funding has failed to be finalized, and one of the sources of funding that has been found took the form of Russia-based aluminum firm Rusal. Rusal has spent part of the decade subject to United States Treasury sanctions, tied in part to a Mueller Report-related investigation into Rusal’s owner’s potential involvement in the 2016 U.S. elections.

The recent leadership change also attracted attention when initial media reports of Bouchard stepping down were followed up by social media posts by Bouchard himself denying the change. Braidy confirmed the change, however, with its Jan. 31 news release.

Skeptics of the Braidy Industries project may have received additional ammunition from a comment by the Republican leader of the Kentucky Senate, Robert Stivers, who reportedly told the media in late January, “Until it gets built, you always have to have concerns.”

In the meantime, the Braidy board and executives are pushing ahead with efforts to build an aluminum alloys production and rolling plant with a planned annual capacity of 300,000 tons of 3000, 5000 and 6000 series aluminum sheet for the automotive and beverage can industries.

Cologne, Germany-based Steinert GmbH says several upgrades and new features have led to the “fifth evolutionary stage” of its UniSort PR sorting technology for recyclable materials.

The company points to “better performance, simplified maintenance [and] new software” as aspects of the new version of UniSort PR, called EVO 5.0.

In a press release about the new features of UniSort PR EVO 5.0, Steinert describes its Intelligent Object Identifier as “an artificial intelligence (AI)-supported object detection system for sorting machines” that can “make for a more stable sorting process, while also improving sorting results.”

Steinert adds, “This improvement has come about through software and the latest developments in the field of machine learning, especially in artificial neural networks.”

The company says the UniSort PR EVO 5.0 “has been put through its paces in practical trials since the start of 2019,” and offers several new or upgraded features, including:

• dynamic calibration designed to monitor the spectrum of the belt lighting;
• revamped light boxes designed to ensure improved detection while also simplifying maintenance, combined with software updates;
• what the company calls optimized valve blocks designed to deliver a consistently precise separation of flowing materials; and
• an optional automatic white balance designed to reduce the intensity of maintenance, eliminate further manual stages and to make new levels of flexibility possible.

“The UniSort PR EVO 5.0 reflects Steinert’s years of experience gained from several UniSort generations and the huge amounts of data that have been processed,” states the firm. “This, in turn, enables users to respond flexibly to changing material flows and recognize, but also most importantly tap into new potentials.”

Steinert is a family-owned business founded in 1889 in Cologne focusing on sensor sorting and magnetic separation for municipal solid waste (MSW), metal recycling and mining. The company has 340 employees, approximately 100 million euros ($111 million) in annual sales and operates from offices and subsidiaries in Germany, Australia, Brazil and the United States.