A Study on Implementation of the Circular Economy to Enhance Corporate Sustainability Development for the Steel Industry as a Case Study

• Main Authors: Chen, Yih-Sheng, 陳亦勝
• Other Authors: Chou, Huann-Ming
• Format: Others
• Language: zh-TW
• Published: 2018
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/x2pt7v

碩士 === 崑山科技大學 === 機械工程研究所 === 106 === The main purpose of developing a circular economy is to abandon the linear economic model of “mass exploitation of resources → production and manufacturing → use of products → abandonment of large amounts of waste” to move towards the sustainable development of enterprises and human society. The steel industry produced 1.63 billion tons of crude steel in 2016, while the amount of scrap was 650 million tons. That means, about 980 million tons of crude steel is produced annually by mining the energy and resources of the earth. In this case, the impact on the environment is relatively serious, so the development of circular economy in the steel industry is an unavoidable responsibility. This study clarifies the implications of the circular economy: Only sustainable and balanced development of the environment, the economy and the society could be feasible and become the ultimate goals in the implementation of the circular economy. This study also made a review of the evolution and the theory of the circular economy, and examines how the steel industry implements a circular economy, the current status, and the direction of further required effort. This study also found that: When the steel industry is developing the program of implementing the circular economy from a macroscopic viewpoint as well as a systematic perspective, it is still difficult to abandon the linear economic model in a short time due to rapid increase in the global population and the increasing amount of steel demand in the world. At present, it seems that we are still limited to the continuous improvement of the existing process equipment in consideration of energy saving and emission reduction, developing the green steel products with low energy consumption and low greenhouse gas emissions calculated from the whole life cycle, and even upgrade to more advanced continuous short production processes if so necessary. In order to achieve the ideal case of a circular economy that does not exploit resources and zero waste, etc., it is still apparent that we need to consider the suppression of global population growth and the need to conserve steel. As the growth rate of scrap production increases rapidly, the supply and demand of scrap will naturally lead to the phasing-out of the environmentally unfriendly processes. This can reduce the exploitation of resources and even meet the global demand of steel only through the recycling of scrap.