I doubt there is a steel mill in the world that uses only virgin iron ore or taconite to make steel. Steel doesn’t come out of the ground as steel. It’s iron ore, usually low grade, which is mostly iron bearing rock The low grade ore is often pre processed and converted to taconite on the iron ranges near the mines.
The steel itself is produced in furnaces and rolling mills where the chemistry is altered with heat and alloys.
Not sure where the misinformation that “virgin” steel is somehow superior to steel with recycle content ever came from.
Recycled steel and other metals can have impurities, alloying agents, or plated coatings that may not be good if used in the mix for new steel.
Current processes may allow steel recyclers to thoroughly sort scrap steel by allow, coating, possible contaminents, etc.( although I doubt it’s foolproof), but older methods of recycling steel and other metals were nowhere near as good, which could cause older metal made from recycled allows to be inconsistent, or possibly toxic.
Cadmium, for instance, used to be commonly used as a rust resistant plating on older tools, and it’s not something you might want in a lot of steel allows, and can cause health issues if you just try to burn it off.
I’ve read about tests of old Disston saws were the allows were found to have chrome and or nickel in them, despite chrome and nickel not being in the standard mix Disston used for their saw steel, so the steel likely contained recycled material.
Swedish steel used to be, and may still be known for a low phosphorous content due to a low amount of phosphorous in the Swedish iron ore. When Sweden had Mauser manufacture rifles for the Swedish army, Sweden supplied their own steel, because they considered the Swedish steel better than the German steel Mauser usually used. If the older steel just hot recycled, a higher phosphorous content might be the steel alloy simply because extra steps were not taken to remove the phosphorous.
As far as other alloys go, Beryllium Copper can cause major issues if it turns up in brass and bronze to be recycled, because the Betyllium is toxic to lungs and requires specialized processing.
The Liberty Bell is a good example of recycled metal causing issues.
The alloy used has too much lead in it, which caused the sound of the bell to be off. Sending it back to London wasn’t really a possibility, so it got recast locally in Philadelphia, with extra new brass added to the mix, but still sounded off, it later cracked, probably because the lead caused the alloy to be weaker and more brittle than it should have been. The theory is that the bell was cast using recycled brass in the mix.
New steel may be able to be made to very high quality, controlled alloy standards, but it doesn’t mean it is being made to those standards, particularly if the steel is coming from some place like China.
While there are steel mills capable of producing top quality steel in China, those mills require giant purchases, so a lot of steel comes from smaller mills that probably throw whatever they can get cheaply into the steel mix.
Even Japan got caught making steel that wasn’t up to the specified alloy, and apparently they had been doing it for a decade or something like that.
Every couple of years a railroad scrap car would show up with load of Sears tools. If Sears made it, it was probably in that car. Most of the stuff was intentionally damaged to make it unusable, but there was still a good selection of stuff that could be returned for warranty
I don't remember other tool brands coming in, but that's not saying they didn't. Those scrap cars were unloaded fairly quickly.