Displaying items by tag: Germany

Germany: The FEhS Building Materials Institute recorded total German granulated blast furnace slag (GBFS) production of 7Mt in 2022. The institute said that cumulative German GBFS production over the 70 years up to 2022 was 227Mt. It said that, if used in cement production, this would be able to replace 398Mt of limestone and eliminate 227Mt of CO₂ emissions.

Germany: Building materials research institute FEhS-Institute says that cement producers used 7.9Mt of German ground granulated blast furnace slag (GGBFS) in cement production in 2022. This corresponds to 71% of the 11.1Mt of slag produced by the domestic iron and steel industries during the year. Other applications for the slag included aggregates production (3.1Mt - 28%) and internal recycling at the refinery (500,000t - 4.5%).

Managing director Thomas Reiche said "Unlike recycled materials, iron mill slags are already high-quality and climate-friendly secondary raw materials in their 'first life.' For decades they have made an important contribution to a sustainable recycling economy in Germany. To ensure that this can continue in the future after the transformation of the steel industry, we have been researching new slags together with our partners since 2013 - for example, with the Direct Reduction Of Iron Ore Electric Furnace Slag and Save CO2 projects to develop Blast Furnace Slag 2.0."

Austria/Germany: Austria-based Porr says it has used a new annular gap mortar bound with granulated slag, instead of cement, on the Filder Tunnel stage of a project for Deutsche Bahn near Stuttgart. The engineering company reports that the pilot project was a success and the ‘practically cement-free construction material’ has already been patented. Porr is now looking for further cooperation partners.

“The nature of the soil means that a cement-based construction material would not have been suitable,” said Porr’s chief executive officer Karl-Heinz Strauss. “This gave us the opportunity to use this brand new construction material”. He added, “Apart from allowing us to contribute to reducing CO², this construction material has two fundamental advantages. It is less sensitive to environmental factors than concrete containing cement. And it can be transported for long periods without any problems before it is processed as it needs an activator to fully harden”.

Image copyright: Arnim Kilgus

Germany: Euroslag and the FEhS-InstitütfürBaustoff-Forschung have spoken of the need for an amendment to European public procurement law to make the uptake of secondary raw materials, including slag, mandatory for public construction tenders. The organisations said that the European Parliament’s latest report on its Circular Economy Action Plan of March 2020 provides for a more strongly ‘ecologically-orientated’ public procurement law.

Euroslag chair and FEhS-InstitütfürBaustoff-Forschung managing director Thomas Reiche said, "The own-initiative report provides the best foundation for binding, forward-looking legislation to consistently promote the circular economy. This also includes fair competition and the conditional prioritisation of secondary raw materials, as also demanded by the rapporteur of the European Parliament Jan Huitema. Only concrete procurement directives with third-party protection character ensure the Europe-wide use of all high-quality secondary building materials, which have been making an important contribution to ecologically and economically sound economic activity for decades!"

Germany: GMI Global’s Slag & Ash Trade Europe 2020 slag and ash conference will take place on 1- 2 October 2020 in Cologne, North Rhine-Westphalia. Keynote speaker Ana Heitor will give a speech entitled “The Use of Granular Waste Materials for Transport Infrastructure Applications,” reflecting on the construction applications of materials including granulated blast furnace slag (GBFS).

India: Gebr. Pfeiffer has announced that it has received an order for one MVR 6000 C-6 roller mill for Chettinand Cement Corp. Pvt. Ltd.’s upcoming 2.0Mt/yr Vishakapatnam granulated blast-furnace slag (GBFS) and slag cement
Grinding plant in Andhra Pradesh. Gebr. Pfeiffer said the mill will grind slag and cement to a fineness of between 3000 and 3800 blaine at a rate of between 235t/hr and 340t/hr. It says the mill improves plant availability by the active redundancy of the grinding rollers, enabling mill operation with reduced rollers in the event of maintenance work or a malfunction.

Sweden: Construction and engineering conglomerate Peab’s subsidiary Swecem has engaged German-based Gebr. Pfeiffer for the supply of one MVR 2500 C-4 grinding mill at its granulated blast furnace slag (GBFS) grinding plant in Oxelösund in Södermanland. The mill has four grinding rollers and a table diameter of 2.5m, giving it a 25t/hr slag grinding capacity.

Swecem operates a concrete plant in Kungsängen. It currently uses ground granulated blast furnace slag (GGBFS) supplied by Irish-based Ecocem’s 0.7Mt/yr Dunkirk grinding plant in France.

Luxembourg: ArcelorMittal plans to reduce its European steel production levels due to weak market demand and high import levels. It will reduce primary steelmaking production at its facilities in Dunkirk, France and Eisenhüttenstadt, Germany. Reduce primary steelmaking production at its facility in Bremen, Germany in the fourth quarter of 2019, where a planned blast furnace stoppage for repair works will be extended. It will extend the stoppage planned in the fourth quarter of 2019 to repair a blast furnace at its plant in Asturias, Spain.

“This is again a hard decision for us to have taken but given the level of weakness in the market, we feel it is the prudent course of action. This will be a temporary measure that will be reversed when market conditions improve. In the meantime, our employees remain our utmost priority and we are doing everything we can to ensure that the right social measures are in place to support them and their families during this difficult time,” said Geert van Poelvoorde, the chief executive officer (CEO) of ArcelorMittal Europe – Flat Products.

In early May 2019 ArcelorMittal announced its intention to temporarily idle production at its steelmaking facilities in Kraków, Poland and reduce production in Asturias, Spain. The announcement also impacted the planned increase of shipments at ArcelorMittal Italia to a 6Mt/yr run-rate. The planned increase will be slowed down following a decision to optimise cost and quality over volume in the current market environment.

Germany: The 10th European Slag Conference will take place in Thessaloniki, Greece on 9 – 11 October 2019. The conference is jointly organised by the Laboratory of Building Materials of the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Euroslag and Aeiforos. The title of the Conference is: Slag based products – best practices for Circular Economy. Key topics at the conference will include: legal framework; utilisation and best practices; research and innovation.

Euroslag is the European association of all main organisations and companies concerned with all aspects of manufacturing and utilisation of ferrous slag products. Thessaloniki's main university, Aristotle University (AUTH), is the largest in Greece and in the Balkans. The Laboratory of Building Materials (AUTH) is devoted to research on utilisation of industrial by-products. Aeiforos, part of the Sidenor Group, offers a large range of services in the field of by-product management and valorisation since 2001.

Germany: Loesche says it is continuing its research and development of a process to create a steel slag suitable for cement production following a legal dispute.

The engineering company has worked with the FA Finger-Institut für Baustoffkunde (FIB) at Bauhaus-Universität Weimar on the thermally reductive modification of steel slags for recycling iron and manufacturing ‘steelworks clinker.’ It has developed two procedures for thermally reductive conditioning of BOF (Basic Oxygen Furnace) slag that have been registered for a patent, which largely differ in the respective cooling process for the remaining molten metal. The individual stages of the procedure have already been tried and tested on an industrial scale. Loesche’s partner for the entire procedure is Primetals Technologies based in Linz, Austria, which has industrial-scale plants for reduction and fast cooling based on patented procedures in its product range. The remaining iron (approximately 8 - 10%) that is still in the ‘steelwork clinker’ can then be separated in a Loesche mill. The separation procedure for this, which has also been patented by Loesche, has been in operation for approximately six years to recycle stainless steel from stainless steel slags in a recycling plant in Belgium.

However, following smelting trials conducted with the Bundesanstalt für Materialforschung und -prüfung (BAM) in 2011, Loesche faced a lawsuit regarding the patents for its procedures. The legal uncertainty that this created led to the suspension of further development and implementation of the two procedures for more than three years. The legal dispute was resolved in December 2017. The second conditioning procedure – the fast cooling – was assigned as the sole property of Loesche. A third of the ownership of the first conditioning procedure - slow cooling – was conceded to the BAM, represented by the German government.

Loesche now plans to implement the second procedure into industrial practice.