Life cycle assessment of internal recycling options of steel slag in Chinese iron and steel industry

The internal recycling process of BOF slag which is one of the huge solid wastes from iron and steel industry was emphasized. Based on the four scenarios of different internal recycling strategies for BOF slag, life cycle assessment (LCA) as a valuable tool for industrial solid waste management was applied to analyze the contribution to reducing environmental impacts and resources burdens for each scenario. The global warming potential (GWP) results of the four scenarios show that the scenario which performs best in carbon reduction cuts off 14.2% of GWP impacts of the worst scenario. The results of this study show that the optimized internal recycling process of BOF slag can improve the environmental performance of crude steel. It is important to assess and choose an appropriate strategy to recycle BOF slag from LCA perspective to reduce the environmental impacts and resource burdens as much as possible. © 2011 Central Iron and Steel Research Institute.