A New Year's fire at steelmaker North Star BlueScope's recycling arm in Mansfield, Ohio, will not impact the company's ferrous scrap production this month, the company told Argus.
Bluescope Recycling and Materials' (BRM) Mansfield shredding operation suffered a fire at one of the facility's downstream processing plants on the evening of 1 January, BlueScope said.
The fire occurred to a downstream processing building where insulated copper wire (ICW) and stainless scrap is sorted, the company said. This portion of the operation has been temporarily shut down, while the Mansfield team works with its insurance carriers and assesses damage.
In the interim, the company has made arrangements to sell the nonferrous scrap flows from this particular stream to other processors.
All other portions of the shredding facility were not impacted by the fire and shred production has been uninterrupted.
BlueScope could not provide an estimate on when production at the affected building will resume as it is still assessing the damage. The cause of the fire is still under investigation.
Fire officials estimate the damage to be around $20mn.
Bluescope is still working to assess the extent of the damage but does not believe the loss will be as high as the initial estimate.
