Society, Materials, and the Environment: The Case of Steel

Abstract

This paper reviews the relationship between the production of steel and the environment as it stands today. It deals with raw material issues (availability, scarcity), energy resources, and generation of by-products, i.e., the circular economy, the anthropogenic iron mine, and the energy transition. The paper also deals with emissions to air (dust, Particulate Matter, heavy metals, Persistant Organics Pollutants), water, and soil, i.e., with toxicity, ecotoxicity, epidemiology, and health issues, but also greenhouse gas emissions, i.e., climate change. The loss of biodiversity is also mentioned. All these topics are analyzed with historical hindsight and the present understanding of their physics and chemistry is discussed, stressing areas where knowledge is still lacking. In the face of all these issues, technological solutions were sought to alleviate their effects: many areas are presently satisfactorily handled (the circular economy—a historical’ practice in the case of steel, energy conservation, air/water/soil emissions) and in line with present environmental regulations; on the other hand, there are important hanging issues, such as the generation of mine tailings (and tailings dam failures), the emissions of greenhouse gases (the steel industry plans to become carbon-neutral by 2050, at least in the EU), and the emission of fine PM, which WHO correlates with premature deaths. Moreover, present regulatory levels of emissions will necessarily become much stricter.

The environment and materials, from the standpoints of ethics, social sciences, law and politics

“…This means reexamining consequentialist ethical theories, deontological ones and virtues ethics (cf. footnote 10 and Sect. 6.5).…”

“…After personally working on countless environmental issues related to materials and publishing widely on many of them as an engineer and a scientist [10], I felt the need for a more rigorous and tightly argued approach regarding the intellectual arguments on which environmental issues are analyzed and judged. I wanted to question the historical background of which I was distinctly part, as most of the structured work in the area goes back to the 1960s and 1970s, the philosophical and ethical backgrounds on which all of this is based and their connection with the formulation of environmental law.…”

“…Traditional Western ethic perspectives assigned intrinsic value 10 to human beings aloneand not to animals or plants or ecosystems: this is called anthropocentric in a strong sense. Therefore, in that sense, protecting the environment makes sense only if this helps protect people, for example for health reasons, because of toxic emissions, or for avoiding the dire consequences of global warming run amok.…”

“…This broader dimension of materials science is reflected regularly in the papers published in Matériaux et Techniques, especially the annual special issue related to the Society and Materials conferences (SAM) [5][6][7][8][9]. Moreover, the author has a book in print entirely devoted to this broad topic [10].…”

Carbon Allocation in Multi-Product Steel Mills That Co‐process Biogenic and Fossil Feedstocks and Adopt Carbon Capture Utilization and Storage Technologies

“…Applying amine absorption to the BFG alone could reduce emissions by 19%-39% (Kuramochi et al, 2012;Ho et al, 2013;Biermann et al, 2019). Other technologies undergoing development include the sorption-enhanced Water-Gas Shift technology (Gazzani et al, 2015;ECN, 2019) with a TRL of 3-6 (Gazzani et al, 2015;Axelson et al, 2018), and Top-Gas-Recycling Blast Furnace (Meijer et al, 2009;Birat, 2020), which involves the recirculation of the BFG as a reducing gas. The choice of BFG over flue gases as the source of CO 2 for partial capture is advantageous in the techno-economic sense due to the higher CO 2 partial pressures (Sundqvist et al, 2018;Biermann et al, 2019) and the absence of oxygen (Dreillard et al, 2017) in the BFG.…”