Swiss Steel Group has been partnering with scrap dealers to produce green steel. The company said that scrap is its primary raw material.
According to a company statement, producing steel from pre-sorted scrap requires less energy and generates less CO2 than producing steel from iron ore and alloy metals. The quality of the scrap directly affects the quality and environmental impact of the resulting steel, it noted.
Swiss Steel Group said it processes more than 2.2m tons of scrap annually in its plants and uses the electric arc furnace route for production.
To produce high-quality steel, the company said it is necessary to use new scrap material from metal processing with precisely known alloying additions. This enables precise control of the composition of the new steel, it cited, resulting in the production of high-grade steel for new quality products.
Steel is one of the most frequently recycled materials in the world and scrap should no longer be considered waste, it noted.
Transporting scrap across Europe is both environmentally damaging and inefficient, the company statement added. The Swiss Steel Group said that steelworks with a strong local presence play a crucial role in establishing regional circular economies by minimising transportation distances. In Germany, France and Switzerland, the company’s steelworks source most of their scrap from within a 90 to 100km radius.
The Swiss Steel Group said cooperation with scrap dealers is crucial. Previously, they only negotiated the price per ton, it noted, but now scrap dealers are system service providers who are compensated for quality and punctuality. A five-stage process maturity model has been implemented to improve scrap quality.
Scrap dealers have become more than just middlemen; they are now important, fully integrated system partners in the steel industry, according to the statement. For instance, the Swiss Steel Group plant in Switzerland is collaborating with scrap suppliers and multiple universities on a project to create a digital twin of incoming scrap. This project utilises big data to enable steelworks to predict the type of scrap that will be delivered, it cited.
