Renewable power · electric melting · recycled metal · reclaimed sand
Green iron, powered by ACEN
Steel is going green by leaving the blast furnace behind. In a foundry the blast furnace's cousin is the cupola, a coke-fired shaft furnace still common across the region. We retired ours in 2003. Today every heat at Metercor is melted by electric induction, and the electricity comes from ACEN, the renewable energy company of the Ayala group.
Renewable electricity
The plant is powered by ACEN. Electricity is the one fuel our melt shop uses, so the cleaner the grid we buy from, the cleaner each kilogram of iron we pour.
No cupola, no coke
Induction furnaces melt with electricity alone. No coke is burned at our plant to melt iron, and there is no cupola stack. That is the foundry equivalent of a steel mill leaving the blast furnace for an electric furnace.
Mostly recycled metal
The charge is mostly steel scrap and our own gates and risers, remelted. Ferroalloys are added to hit the chemistry. Pig iron goes in only when a special alloy needs it to control the chemistry. Every heat is checked on the spectrometer before it is poured.
Reclaimed sand, inorganic binder
No-bake molds use a sodium silicate binder, not furan resin, and the sand goes back through a Richards reclaimer. Green sand is conditioned and reused in a closed 160-ton system.
Take-back of worn castings
We are developing a program with automotive customers to remelt their end-of-life heat-treatment trays into new trays, without carrying the contamination into the new chemistry.
Local supply
A casting made 40 km from Batangas Port, or two hours from your plant, does not cross an ocean. For Philippine buyers, the lowest-carbon freight is the freight that never happens.
For steelmakers and manufacturers building low-carbon supply chains
Steel mills that melt scrap in electric furnaces are asking the same of their suppliers. Wear parts, guide inserts, liners and fixtures are consumables a mill buys every month. When they are melted on renewable electricity, in an electric furnace, from recycled metal, they fit the story the mill is telling its own customers.
We supply ductile iron guide inserts to a Philippine rebar mill today and want to do far more of that work. If your company reports its supply-chain emissions, we will give you the facts we have for each order: melting method, power supplier, charge make-up and the heat records behind them.
What we do not claim
- We hold no green-steel or low-carbon certification and no audited carbon footprint per kilogram. When we have one, it will be here.
- Pig iron is made in blast furnaces upstream. We add it only for special alloys, and only when needed to control the chemistry.
- Some heat treatment and machining is done by partners on their own power.