Abstract
This chapter establishes the foundation and rapid expansion of a private steel corporation in a frontier terrain leveraging both the relative security of Iraqi Kurdistan and the material destruction of the rest of Iraq as our ethnographic case study. It first describes the global shift in the steelmaking business from predominantly national and capital-intensive integrated steel mills that make steel from iron ore in a blast furnace into more flexible mini steel mills that melt scrap metal resources in electrified arc furnaces. The chapter then describes how scrap metal resources were ‘violently’ created in the region’s war cycles over the last three decades, transforming the landscape into a new frontier zone for the commercial capture of cheap and abundant scrap metal. Finally, it recounts how, in the context of a war economy and political fluctuations, nurturing a scrap metal yard emerges as one of the most essential tasks while operating on a frontier landscape.
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Notes
- 1.
Today, not all integrated steel plants, such as Krupp Steel in Germany and Tata Steel in India, are owned by the state.
- 2.
See S.L. (1952, 210) for how also in Soviet socialism the expansion of steel under com-pulsion had been built on human misery, waste, and ruthless working conditions.
- 3.
When compared to steel production from iron ore, mini mill steel manufacturing reduces greenhouse gas emissions (Mckinsey & Company 2020).
- 4.
See Fathi (2013) for the impact of depleted uranium in Iraq on cancer rates and birth defects in the Iraqi population since the Gulf Wars.
- 5.
See Guarasci (2017, 9–10) how international corporations used biodiversity conservation as a source of accumulation through the case of war time restoration of marshes of Iraq.
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Kuruüzüm, U. (2022). The New Frontier of Scrap Recycling. In: Building from Scrap. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-92220-7_3
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