FERROUS
69recyclinginternational.com | March/April | 2023
(Mt), a 4.2% decrease on 2021,
according to the World Steel
Association (worldsteel).
China still dominates the global
league table with output of more
than one thousand million tonnes but
production was down 2.1% on the
year before.
Among others in the top 10, only
India at +5.5% and Iran (+8.0%)
increased production in 2022.
Declines were recorded last year by
the remaining seven: Japan (-7.4%),
USA (-5.9%), Russia (estimated to be
5.9% down), South Korea (-6.5%),
Germany (-8.4%), Turkey (-12.9%) and
Brazil (-5.8%).
The output for January 2023 is put at
145.3 million tonnes (Mt), 3.3% down
on January 2022. Of the major pro-
ducers, China is estimated to have
produced 79.5 Mt in January 2023,
up 2.3% on January 2022, while
India’s total was 10.9 Mt (-0.2%).
STEEL RECYCLER TOPS GLOBAL
SUSTAINABILITY LIST
Luxembourg steelmaker Tenaris is coordinating a collective
industry effort to demonstrate the sustainability of new tech-
nologies to recover steelmaking residues. The project, the
Recovering Metals and Mineral Fraction, known as the
ReMFra, aims to promote practices to increase the circularity
and sustainability of the EU steel industry.
A consortium has been created from industry and academia,
including Tenova, RINA-CSM, K1-MET, Voestalpine,
Thyssenkrupp and Tata Steel. The project will last for three-
and-a-half years and will develop and validate two pyromet-
allurgic melting and reduction demonstration plants at indus-
trial scale to recover metals and minerals fraction from a
wide range of steelmaking residues.
The partners will work to develop two main technologies:
plasma reactor and RecoDust. The first recovers residues
containing high percentages of iron oxide (scale, sludge,
slag) with the aim of producing pig iron by using recycled
plastic waste as a reducing agent. The second focuses on
recovering zinc from dusts derived from basic oxygen fur-
nace fume abatement through its reduction into a gas
stream containing hydrogen.
‘This kind of initiative, where there is a keen awareness of a
circular economy in the steel sector, is especially important
today,’ says Fabio Praolini, environment regional director at
Tenaris. ‘This experience will certainly be useful for reducing
the consumption of non-renewable resources and therefore
Europe’s reliance on foreign supplies.’
66-67-68-69_maferrous.indd 69 15-03-2023 11:49
