No less a figure than Lakshmi N. Mittal sounded a warning note in his otherwise upbeat speech at AMM's Steel Success Strategies XXIII conference in June. Surging input costs are "unsustainable," he said, and risk hurting the steel industry's customers.

But what happens if accurate information on the price of raw materials isn't readily available? For those in the scrap and steel industries, that's become a pressing question in the past two months. As many of our readers are aware, AMM's No. 1 factory bundles price—widely used as an indicator for countless monthly purchases of prime industrial scrap—has been unavailable since early June.

This absence was not of AMM's making. In late May, Steel Dynamics Inc.'s scrap subsidiary, OmniSource Corp., and Chrysler LLC announced new plans to market the automaker's bundles. Instead of month-to-month auctions with successful bids that become widely...