Environmental Impact Assessment of Steel Production in Indonesia : A Case Study

Abstract

One of the biggest energy consumers and CO2 emitters in the world is the steel sector. With the growth in infrastructure construction, steel output has risen year over year. Therefore, a life cycle assessment of inputs and outputs at each stage of the steel manufacturing process is necessary to enable the adoption of life cycle management and offer sustainable production and consumption. The Life Cycle Assessment method is employed in this study to assess the environmental effects of steel manufacturing in Indonesia. The CML-IA baseline method, which assesses several impact categories including global warming, ozone layer depletion, acidification, and eutrophication, and others impact was used in this study and SimaPro 9.2 software was used to calculate the environmental impact of steel production. According to the findings, the largest contributors to the overall impact are the electric arc furnace, rolling mills, ladle furnaces, which use chemicals, and reheating furnaces, which use LPG. The entire impact of the steel manufacturing process on global warming, using a functional unit of 1 ton steel, is 1215.17 kg CO2 eq, of which the Electric Arc Furnace (EAF) contributes 477.37 kg CO2 eq, or 39% of the total CO2 emissions. Based on these findings, an effort is therefore required to reduce the consumption of fuel in the reheating furnace as well as electricity in the EAF and rolling mills.