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[warwizard]

The why is if you have the goblinite available, you might as well throw it in, and also for some reasons the modern processes seem to need a bunch of scrap metals to throw into the melt.

[GavJ]

you might as well throw it in

No... you then require more fuel to melt the extra metal that you threw in for no reason that was already finished. That's just wasteful. And it's not reducing the amount of slag you have to remove anyway. If anything, it makes it more of a pain in the ass as a process as well, because it's now higher volume of metal which makes it more difficult to expose all of it to the air flow.

for some reasons the modern processes seem to need a bunch of scrap metals to throw into the melt.

I would assume they're doing that because they have local small amounts of IMPURE scrap available. For example, random bits of metal that splashed onto the floor from earlier but might have slag still, or old dirty pipes and things from nearby businesses or car graveyards that are all like "oh hey there's a steel foundry next door, might as well make some convenient scrap sales"  Probably not for any chemistry reasons.

Could be wrong. Do you have some links for where you saw that?  Also keep in mind that modern methods are different from both blast furnaces and Bessemer.  Nowadays they use electric arc furnaces and other things. It's possible that you need some clean scrap to help conduct electricity better or some such, specific to those methods, I don't know.

[warwizard]

The how it's made episode on steelmaking http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P07DvnnJRmc http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mRA6RY2o9Lg showing using large charges of scrap.

[GavJ]

The how it's made episode on steelmaking http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P07DvnnJRmc http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mRA6RY2o9Lg showing using large charges of scrap.

As I guessed above, they don't say that scrap is chemically relevant here. It looks like they're simply recycling.

Scrap metal isn't clean. It's from chopped up cars and stuff, thus it has salt muck, dirt, paint, oil, etc. etc. So you need to treat it like ore and smelt out those impurities, which is why you'd put it in the crucible and not just roll it into bars.

In DF, though, swords and armor would likely be much cleaner, basically just pure iron, and getting rid of "impurities" like leather straps is just an issue of cutting the straps. Or cutting off a handle, or whatever, which would probably be a trivial task for dwarves, as opposed to the impossible task of modern humans trying to clean and sandblast every one of literally millions of little scrap strips.