Abstract
Over the last few decades, the European steel industry has focused its efforts on the improvement of by-product recovery and quality, based not only on existing technologies, but also on the development of innovative sustainable solutions. These activities have led the steel industry to save natural resources and to reduce its environmental impact, resulting in being closer to its “zero-waste” goal. In addition, the concept of Circular Economy has been recently strongly emphasised at a European level. The opportunity is perceived of improving the environmental sustainability of the steel production by saving primary raw materials and costs related to by-products and waste landfilling. The aim of this review paper was to analyse the most recent results on the reuse and recycling of by-products of the steelmaking cycles as well as on the exploitation of by-products from other activities outside the steel production cycle, such as alternative carbon sources (e.g., biomasses and plastics). The most relevant results are identified and a global vision of the state-of-the-art is extracted, in order to provide a comprehensive overview of the main outcomes achieved by the European steel industry and of the ongoing or potential synergies with other industrial sectors.
Highlights
The increasingly stringent European regulation and the ever-higher disposal costs currently affect manufacturing industries, leading them to strengthen their efforts in order to improve the recycling rate of their by-products and waste [1]
70% of the world steel is produced utilising the first one, based on Blast Furnace (BF), where iron ore is reduced to pig iron, which is afterwards converted into steel in the Basic Oxygen Furnace (BOF)
A further application concerns the use of slag as energy storage material in Thermal Energy Storage (TES) systems, which are widely used in Concentrated Solar Power Plants (CSPs) to collect energy [52]
Summary
The increasingly stringent European regulation and the ever-higher disposal costs currently affect manufacturing industries, leading them to strengthen their efforts in order to improve the recycling rate of their by-products and waste [1]. The European steel industry, in order to increase its competitiveness, is committed to introducing innovative actions on high performance products and to increasing process efficiency, by reducing its environmental impacts [5,6,7,8] (see Figure 1). This strategy needs further investigations in different conditions for new implementations [9], such as the recycling method of red mud, comprised of the carbon-bearing red mud pellets roasting in the rotary hearth furnace and smelting separation in the EAF [10].
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