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ResponsibleSteel, a not-for-profit organization registered in Australia, already provides site certifications, and the new steel certification will require stakeholders to adhere to enhanced requirements on top of those required for the site certification, policy and impacts director Shivakumar Kuppuswamy told Fastmarkets on Wednesday June 28.
All members of ResponsibleSteel, from both the industrial and civilian sectors, need to vote before the steel certificate is introduced, Shivakumar said.
“The site certifications have been in place for three years, whereas the steel certification is in the draft stage,” Shivakumar told Fastmarkets, noting that the process of being certified by ResponsibleSteel is “technology agnostic.”
There is a lot of interest in sustainable steel certifications from heavy steel consumers such as the automobile or construction industries, which in turn creates demand for standardized certifications, Shivakumar said.
Several steelmakers, including Voestalpine, ArcelorMittal and US Steel, have received site certifications from ResponsibleSteel in recent months.
Steelmakers in the United States have often highlighted the difference between carbon emissions produced by electric-arc furnace (EAF) steelmaking and those of the rest of the world, which relies heavily on the blast furnace-basic oxygen furnace (BF-BOF) process.
About 70.60% of steel produced in the US is via EAF, as opposed to only 26% of steel produced globally through EAFs, Lisa Harrison, senior vice president of communications at AISI, told Fastmarkets previously.
Additionally, the US steel industry represents only 1% of all the carbon dioxide generated in the country, Lourenco Goncalves, chairman, president and chief executive officer of Cleveland-Cliffs, said during Fastmarkets’ Steel Success Strategies conference on June 6.