The trade of steel is an important part of the global economy, with about five million people involved in making this metal worldwide and a further million people employed in service centers, galvanizing plants and trading. Every year the world produces about 1,600 million tons of crude steel – the equivalent weight of about 160,000 Eiffel Towers.
It’s also of vital important to the US. The country is the world’s top importer of steel – with $29 billion of the material shipped into the United States in 2017 alone – and so it’s easy to see why politicians focus on this.
So, what underpins these big numbers? As CNN notes, roughly half of all steel is used in buildings and infrastructure, helping to construct frames and pipes in everything from skyscrapers to homes and bridges.
