Recycling steel in an arc furnace is cheaper and uses less power than making new steel. The only reason we’re not on 100% recycled steel is because demand outstrips supply. Those upstrram processes are more expensive!
Even the cheapest, dirtiest iron ore from Brazil or Australia can't compete with steel scrap in the US or EU because recycling uses less than quarter of the total power and produces a fifth of the emissions that producing virgin steel does. You can't greenwash something when the green version costs way less than the polluting one. It'll be written on the price tag!
You seem to be confused. Using steel as a raw material is not "scrapping and recycling". The value of steel in engineering applications is that you can trust that the properties of a particular alloy used to make a particular part will comply with the specs. Steel from China is renowned for being unreliable and failing to comply with standardized properties.
https://www.cdmg.com/building-faqs/why-using-cheap-steel-is-...
You avoid that risk by importing steel as a raw material and use that to actually produce reliable steel. If low-quality steel is cheap enough so that after recycling it you can still make a profit then it's a sound business decision and the whole economy benefits.
My impression was most of the recycling energy inputs were in collection, sorting, and shipping.
The table on page 15 lists the megajoules per ton required to produce steel with various amounts of scrap content. When made with 100% recycled scrap, steel requires "only" 1,289 megajoules per ton. Based on that wiki page rail requires 150 kilojoules per metric ton kilometer so a ton of steel costs only about 75 megajoules to transport a thousand km.
Large container ships use half that much energy so even if the steel scrap must be shipped overseas and back ten thousand km, it'd still be under 400 megajoules for transportation versus over 1,200 megajoules for recycling. The rest of the costs like sorting are negligible.
In practice it takes at least 2,500-3,000 megajoules per ton of steel since the scrap has to be mixed with other sources of iron when there's not enough scrap to go around. The number for aluminum are a lot worse, on the order of ten times more megajoules per ton to extract alumina from ore via electrolysis versus smelting aluminum scrap, which already requires 10x the energy of steel.
[1] https://www.energy.gov/eere/amo/articles/itp-steel-theoretic...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_efficiency_in_transport