Many research initiatives and projects funded by the RFCS have been undertaken in order to improve reuse and recycling of by-products which are produced in different stages of the integrated or electric steel production cycle (e.g. slags, sludge and scale) and for recovering valuable materials from wastes. 

Recently, the concept of “circular economy” is receiving increasing attention in the scientific and technical community. The circularity concept pushes researchers and industries to look for synergies with other industrial sectors to analyze and investigate solution for improving by-product re-use and recycling both inside and outside the steelmaking cycle, by thus developing examples of industrial symbiosis.

However, the joint efforts of the EU steel industries on this theme are still not widely known. 

Moreover, the exploitation of some research results are sometimes hampered by not homogeneous regulations in the different European countries concerning even the definition and classification of some materials as by-products or wastes.

REUSteel aims at extensively disseminating and valorizing important research results on the reuse and recycling of by-products, based on an integrated critical analysis of many list of EU-funded projects, in order to promote the results exploitation and increase the synergies with other sectors. 

This analysis will also aim at identifying the most urgent needing and ambitions of the EU steel sector, by defining future research topics in this field and highlighting eventual non-technical showstoppers. Common actions will be identified in order to overcome or smooth the existing obstacles and to pave the way to research and implementation of innovative solutions. The target is a wider improvement of byproducts reuse and recycling, which can be developed in the future years. 

The key findings will be implemented in the ESTEP’s Strategic Research Agenda. REUSteel will contribute to the “Low carbon Europe and Big-Scale” initiative of EUROFER.