Environmental compliance and profitable steelmaking – always a challenge!

Badische Stahlwerke GmbH (BSW) in Kehl, Germany is located on the river Rhine close to the Black Forest. As a consequence, the environmental regulations for BSW are even more stringent than the al-ready stringent German regulations. BSW has been elaborating over the years many concepts for the reduction of environmental impact by a steel plant. These concepts deal with the reduction of emissions to air water and soil, but also with the recycling of all by-products from steel making like slag, dust, scale and some others. The success of these concepts can be seen by the very low emission values of BSW and also the profit derived from the recycling of by-products. Other ideas have been worked out to minimise noise emissions and to detect radioactive sources that are coming together with the scrap into the steel making process. This problem is getting more and more serious. With the experience of more than 30 years in environmental protection in the steel industry, BSE offers these concepts and solutions to other mini-mills to shorten implementation time of environmental protection and to avoid expensive mistakes. This paper shows which level of emissions can be reached without having any disadvantage on productivity.