Modelling recycling and material efficiency trends in the European steel industry

Analyses and/or scenarios of future industrial production, especially in the field of energy-intensive industries, can be useful for a variety of different task e.g. policy advice, energy demand modelling, resource availability/sustainability, and other. Especially future projection of the physical production differentiated on process level including the modelling of structural change and material strategies are of major importance to generate comprehensive and transparent scenario projections/results. In this context, another challenge is the modelling of this physical production in a hybrid model system, which means to link economic and demographic information provided by a macroeconomic model to the projection of physical production units, e.g. tonnes of an industrial branch. In this paper a short analysis of the historic steel production for selected European countries has been made, selected literature on material efficiency and recycling potentials is reported, and a methodology for the hybrid modelling of future steel use and production on process level as well as scrap availability is described. The paper shows that steel is an old energy-intensive product, facing a decreasing GDP intensity, with a trend to secondary production. This trend to secondary production makes the domestic scrap availability, but also trade in scrap and scrap quality an important factor which has to be considered when modelling future steel production. The developed methodology describes a comprehensive approach to translate macroeconomic sector information, e.g. economic value of an industry (gross value added), into apparent steel use/true steel use of a country and calculate its physical production of crude steel, electric steel, and oxygen steel considering structural change, prompt scrap availability, and end-of-life scrap availability on European level. Finally, limitations of the methods used will be discussed.