Eurosteelmaster 2019: reserve your seat now
Our industrial economy has hardly moved beyond one fundamental characteristic established in the early days of industrialisation: a linear model of resource consumption that follows a ‘take-make-dispose’ pattern. Companies harvest and extract materials, use them to manufacture a product, and sell the product to a consumer, who then discards it when it no longer serves its purpose.
A circular economy represents a fundamental alternative to the linear take-make-consume-dispose economic model that currently predominates.
Since it is a vital material in our modern world, steel has always been at the center of a circular economy model. In applications with a long service life, we will need to wait a hundred years or more to recycle the steel they contain. Every piece of steel can eventually be recycled to meet the growing global need for new steel.
More than 65% of waste produced by the Italian steel industry is recovered. The residues of steel production processes are particularly suitable to be valorized as by-products or products and used in civil applications. On the other hand, it is possible the recycle, in the steel production cycle, residues or by-products coming from other industrial sectors.
In this area we have studied, set up and applied the transformation of steel slag in a product to be used for road construction, and the use of plastics, char coal form biomass, and car fluff in substitution of coal in electric arc furnace.
We are able to provide such solutions thanks to the expertise of Centro Sviluppo Materiali, established in 1963 as a key player in the technological transfer and integrated into RINA since 2013.
The contribution will be based on the comparison between pro and contras of linear and circular models, using real applications, focusing the attention on steel industry. A typical example is the production and use of pre-reduced material, material with high content of metallic iron, produced with low environmental impact processes, based on the use of natural gas or on the recycling of process gases in substitution of coal.
