'Zero carbon steel'

Evening all. I really like my wood burning stove. It's lovely. I could do with getting it to sit further out in the room perhaps, so I've looked at buying an offset pipe.

Now, all the pipes I see are proudly made of laser welded 'zero carbon steel'.

Whilst I'm not a dyed-in-the-wool metallurgist, I'm slowly becoming one and I hang around with people with PhDs in metallurgy. We don't know about this zero carbon steel.

What on earth is zero carbon steel, other than iron?

Thank you...!

Ed.

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Could it be that it's to keep the green brigade happy by 'stating' that the metal or the weld has been produced without carbon emissions.?

Whether it has or not is of course a different story.!

Nick

Edit :- But just thinking about it. Someone who has a log burning stove will not give a rats testicles about chucking carbon into the atmosphere. 

Edited By Nick_G on 15/04/2017 22:31:38

<siri> I found this on the web </siri>

www.thefifthestate.com.au/innovation/building-construction/sweden-aims-for-first-place-in-carbon-free-steel-race/81456

304 stainless has less than 0.08% C. 304L has even less **LINK**

Perhaps this is close enough to zero for the advertisers.

Cheers,

Rod

Just a "dodge the Enviro-Nazis" label.

Refers to how the steel is produced. For example an electric arc furnace fed with scrap steel is, according to industry definitions, zero carbon because no carbon dioxide is directly produced and released during the steel making process. Carbon dioxide released by the generating plant supplying the electric arc furnace doesn't count.

Clive.

I don't *think* the pipes are Stainless.

Maybe they are? The existing one is covered in Matt black enamel, I guess to keep the flue gases nice and hot (buoyant).

So they're either Stainless or there's some marketing/environmentalism going on...

Similar to the nitro-cellulose thinners I saw for sale the other day. Made me look twice and then google it I must admit!

Zero carbon steel? A lot of tosh and "green speak". In very simple terms steel is made by adding CARBON, normally between 0.002% and 2.1%, in the blast furnace. Other materials are added to produce specific grades of steel of course.

Lots of talk about zero carbon during the production process, but Zero, Carbon and Steel in the same sentence is nonsense.

I can't really see what's wrong with it.

If they've found a way to reach the same product but don't have to dump the waste into the air then good for them.

Michael W

Green-wash marketing new-speak.

If the steel has been made using only renewables, then that is good, but wrapping it up in a 'zero carbon' label indicates the fool creating the marketing lines is as technically ignorant and incompetent as most such people. They should at least be aware of how much they are ignorant of, as opposed to the usual 'go ahead anyway'.

Regards

Richard.

Steel contains carbon. There is no doubt about that - simply by definition! So this carbon they are referring to has nothing to do with the chemical composition of steel. Make no mistake about that!

Pig iron contains far more carbon, which is removed (to the atmosphere) to convert the basic iron production into steel. Only a few years past, the scrap metal merchants were offering around £150 for every ton of scrap iron/sreel and then sending it all the way tonChina for processing into our new goods.

Now, with scrap steel at around £35/tonne (at the scrappy), recycling is clearly far cheaper. It still needs energy for remelting, but some of that energy is now from renewable sources, so cleaner.

This 'zero carbon' steel is simply referring to melting scrap with either all fossil-free electricity and comparing it with other structural building materials (mainly concrete). That is all. Marketing spin, nothing more.

.

Because the Chinese are really, really concerned about renewable energy at chucking muck into the air ain't they.?

Can the retailers of this so called zero carbon steel provide documentation (as required by many) back to original source.?

Nick

If you see the link I posted, it does. Sweden's electricty is nearly all hydro, wind or nuclear.

Neil

I had a salesman the other week at the medical equipment supply store tell me that their premium brand bath chairs were made from low carbon steel so would not rust in the shower. The cheaper ones his competitors sell are made from recycled steel that is dirty and contains lots of carbon so you end up with "high-carbon steel" that rusts and falls apart more easily than the better quality low carbon steel.

Well, that's what he told me.

I would not be without my woodstove and have no hangups about it's construction. Just buy the pipe and move it.

Posted by Nick_G on 15/04/2017 22:29:18:Edit :- But just thinking about it. Someone who has a log burning stove will not give a rats testicles about chucking carbon into the atmosphere.

Edited By Nick_G on 15/04/2017 22:31:38

Burning wood produces no more carbon emission than growing the trees absorbs.

Russell

Recycled steel is total crap. When they scrap cars they go into a giant shredder and all types of steel is mixed together. So you get high carbon steel mixed with mild steel and this gets made into black steel which is only good for non structural work!

Engineering and structural steel beams are always made from new steel. Some modern cars are now made from boron steel!

Posted by Russell Eberhardt on 16/04/2017 10:15:14:

Posted by Nick_G on 15/04/2017 22:29:18:Edit :- But just thinking about it. Someone who has a log burning stove will not give a rats testicles about chucking carbon into the atmosphere.

Edited By Nick_G on 15/04/2017 22:31:38

Burning wood produces no more carbon emission than growing the trees absorbs.

Russell

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Interesting point, Russell

... but I would mention that the cycle-times differ by several orders of magnitude:

This may [or may not] be significant; depending on how the atmosphere responds

MichaelG.

It takes a tree a hundred years to collect that carbon from the atmosphere. Burning it releases that carbon in less than an hour.

Not to mention the air pollution from wood burning **LINK**

It's complicated

Rod

My wife keeps releasing large amounts of methane. Should i worry that i will have to replace her with a newer, more enviromentally friendly model