Our takeaways from the World Circular Economy Forum 2023

Key takeaways from WWF Finland’s Accelerator Session

• Ville-Valtteri Visuri, University of Oulu: EU is exporting scrap. Scrap availability will increase rapidly in China.
• Rafal Malinowski, Systemiq Ltd.: Today’s scrap-based steel is made possible by past decades of iron ore-based steel production. Scrap is a global good. The scrap used by one company is not available for another company.
• Dr Philippa Horton, University of Cambridge: It is a climate emergency. We don’t have time to wait, but we need to act now. Present downcycling must be fixed. High value recycling must become a priority. For a just transition, we need more focus on material efficiency.
• Tuomas Haikka, Kuusakoski Recycling: The average lifecycle of steel products is approx. 40 years. The steel scrap recycled today was produced in the 1980s. We should move towards ecodesign — design a product for recycling instead of design recycling for the product reaching end-of-life, as we are doing today.
• Juha Erkkilä, Outokumpu: SBTi is more than an initiative, with 5,000 companies aligned — it’s a movement!

At the end of our session, we took a poll and found out that the participants of WWF Finland’s session “The role of scrap in steel sector decarbonization” were convinced that the share of circulated steel will be over 50% globally by 2050.

Watch the recording of our session:

Key takeaways from WCEF2023 from a steel decarbonization point of view

• There are two complementing routes to avoid up to 9% of the world’s CO₂ emissions through decarbonizing steel production. The first is to circulate end-of-life steel as much as possible. The other is to adopt fossil-free technologies in primary iron production. Both routes typically use electric arc furnaces for the second production phase. The final product can be a mixture of the two sources, providing flexibility in the process.
• The share of end-of-life scrap collected worldwide needs to be increased, and the purity of steel scrap improved to save energy, minerals, and the environment. Circulating steel is already a mature and proven technology, while fossil-free primary iron volumes will be tied to the availability of affordable low-emission electricity and green hydrogen. However, impurities like copper in steel scrap tend to limit the share of scrap in certain steel products, and cumulating impurities may limit the amount of times the steel can be recycled.
• As the demand for steel keeps on growing, there is not enough scrap available to fulfil all current steel demand with recycled steel. Therefore, new products and constructions need to be designed so that they use steel efficiently, have a long lifecycle and are designed for recycling in the first place.
• To decarbonize the primary steel production, a lot of investments in fossil-free electricity and hydrogen production are needed. The renewable energy sector is developing fast in production volumes, cost competitiveness as well as in solving challenges related to the material use. In a WCEF2023 Accelerator Session called “Towards sustainable hydrogen economy” (organized by the Hydrogen Cluster Finland), new technologies and industrial cooperation in the form of clusters and cross-border distribution networks were presented. Prominent old as well as new industrial players of the green steel game presented their business plans.

In general, the atmosphere at WCEF2023 was optimistic concerning the economic viability of steel decarbonization.