GREEN STEEL
Making steel is always going to be hot work. And green as well in the future
Think of steel making and you’re likely to come up with a picture of searing heat as well as a huge demand for energy and high levels of carbon emissions. We want to and can change the last point. By increasing the use of high-quality recycled raw materials, steel production can become a much greener and more climate-friendly business. This is really important. Because steel is – and always will be – a key material.
There’s no alternative to green steel. There is to how we get there
The steel industry is one of the world’s biggest carbon emitters. Why? Because steel production – i.e. making steel from iron ore – requires enormous volumes of coal and coke, which are both fossil fuels. With the Green Deals's goal in mind, namely for Europe to be climate neutral by 2050, the steel industry is working hard on becoming more environmentally friendly. The catchword here is ‘green steel’. The solution should be to use hydrogen rather than carbon. There are two snags here, however. Firstly, more than ten years will be needed to develop the technical conditions so that they can do this. Secondly, if the desired environmental impact is to be achieved, then the hydrogen itself must be green – i.e. produced using renewable energy.
Focusing on the materials
According to industry experts, it will be impossible to supply the amount of green energy (wind, solar etc) needed to produce sufficient volumes of green hydrogen before 2035. Which means that hydrogen can be ruled out as a quick way to get to green steel. There is, however, an alternative solution that focuses on the material rather than on the energy used. We’re talking about the high-quality recycled raw material TSR40 here. Something that also greatly reduces energy consumption and carbon emissions. And, on top of this, something that conserves natural resources – here iron ore – on a grand scale. And not sometime in the future but right now.
The green potential of recycled raw materials
Recycling is always a good idea as a way to tackle climate change. There are, however, very few processes that are more sustainable than metal recycling. There are a number of reasons for this, one of them being that metals can be processed again and again without them losing their quality. This means that fewer virgin raw materials need to be mined. The impact of metal recycling on cutting carbon emissions is just as positive. Using recycled material to produce steel and other metal products requires far less energy, which means it also generates fewer carbon emissions. Every tonne of steel scrap used saves 1.4 tonnes of CO2. This fact alone should be motivation enough to use as many recycled raw materials as possible in steel production. Especially as this benefits the environment as well as the climate and resource conservation. Using recycled raw materials means fewer natural resources must be extracted from the ground. This, in turn, means less damage to the environment caused by mining.
Increasing the amount of recycled raw material user to 25% would cut annual carbon emissions bei 3.2 million tonnes – having the same impact on the climate as 250,000 hectares of woodland, an area as large as Germany's Saarland region.
The greater the amount of recycled material, the greener the steel
At the moment, the volumes of recycled material used to produce steel is very low. It would, however, be possible and doable to greatly increase this figure. For this to happen, however, it is essential that the material supplied has the highest possible purity levels. And this is precisely where we or rather our subsidiary TSR Recycling come into play. This company specialises in all aspects of metal recycling. Using state-of-the-art technology, these metal recycling specialists have achieved something truly unique: they transform post-consumer material into a recycled raw material of such high quality that it can be used to produce top quality flat steel products, such as car bodies. Which makes us, the REMONDIS Group, a must-have partner for the steel industry and downstream product manufacturers that also wish to unite climate action, resource protection and top quality.
Find out more about TSR Recycling’s high-quality products at tsr.eu
Capturing the market in record time
In 2021, TSR Recycling entered into a collaboration with Thyssenkrupp to develop innovative solutions that would enable steel to be produced right now in a more sustainable way with fewer carbon emissions. This plan became a real success story in less than two years. Built within just twelve months, the world’s first TSR40 processing facility was commissioned in April 2023. In the presence of many well-known business leaders and politicians. But primarily with excellent prospects for green steel and downstream sectors such as the automotive industry. The maths is simple: the greener the steel, the greener the products are that are made from it. However, TSR’s production operations have not only achieved a milestone regarding the quality of the material. TSR has also opened up a huge new opportunity for delivering secure supplies. TSR’s plant in Duisburg alone is able to transform 450,000 tonnes of input material into 330,000 tonnes of its high-quality recycled product TSR40. Its second production line was commissioned in Amsterdam in the middle of 2024. More are to follow.
“Our recycled product TSR40 illustrates, therefore, how raw materials can be sustainably secured in Germany and Europe and will enable us to cover a considerable amount of the industry’s future demand for raw materials. Besides the positive impact it will have on protecting the environment and curbing climate change, this development is also our contribution towards a sustainable circularity strategy and achieving the goals of the European Green Deal.”
Bernd Fleschenberg, Managing Director of TSR Recycling
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