Programme nominated for the Excellence in Life Cycle Assessment Steelie Award 2023

Baosteel’s LCA team has built an online detailed LCA platform for steel products, which can implement a prompt and consistent LCA study in a similar way as mechanical performance testing. The LCA platform has been used to evaluate the low-carbon product needs of 48 users in automobiles, home appliances, construction, energy industries, etc., of which 10 have entered the technical requirements negotiation stage.

This LCA platform enables:

  1. Carbon footprinting of each product (steel coil). The carbon footprint of any product range can be obtained based on the platform, such as specific grades, given batches, end users, etc;
  2. Environmental footprint calculation and LCA reporting of products for third-party verification and disclosure to customers;
  3. Online analysis of environmental impacts of products under different production paths and processes, providing optimisation suggestions to the research department.

Based on the analysis model, process engineers compared the intermediate product data of the same standard cold product from Baosteel’s Baoshan and Dongshan and discovered an opportunity for improvement, which ended up resulting in a 3% reduction in CO2 emissions of the product by adjusting the heating process. The platform has also been used for supporting its low-carbon strategic cooperation project with the automotive manufacturing company.