Show your mettle

An environmentally-friendly technology that uses water instead of hazardous acid to clean hot-rolled black steel coil is in use at a West Midlands steel processing plant. known as

, the process was installed at

main facility in Dudley last month

and has the capacity to process 200,000 tonnes of steel coil a year.

SCS differs from the traditional steel cleaning method, pickling, which uses an acid solution to clean steel before it is processed further. SCS uses only high-pressure water and specially-developed abrasive brushes. After cleaning, the steel is claimed to remain rust free under normal conditions without the need for any coating or covering with oil, which is required for pickled coil.

The system has proved effective in several commercial applications in the US, said its developers, Illinois-based

. The company claims that three-year-old SCS-treated coil samples still show no signs of rust. This is because the brushing process removes the topmost layers of scale, leaving only a seven micron-thick layer of wustite — an iron oxide in its mineral form.