The TransZeroWaste project proudly participated in the ESTEP Spring Dissemination Event 2025, held on June 5–6 in Kraków, Poland. Organized by the European Steel Technology Platform (ESTEP), this key industry event brought together experts, researchers, and innovators from across Europe to share progress on decarbonisation, digitalisation, and workforce transformation in the steel sector.
The TransZeroWaste project aims to upgrade low-quality iron ores and residues such as dust and mill scale with low carbon technologies. Three breakthrough-technologies are under development to produce high quality pre-material for decarbonised future production routes:
- cold pelletisation and briquetting in combination with new binders,
- hot pelletisation with microwaves in a rotary kiln to increase the iron metallisation grade and to remove zinc in parallel,
- modified magnetic separator for removal of oil from low-quality iron ore equivalents such as oily fine mill scale
During the ESTEP event, Gerald Stubbe from the BFI on behalf of the project consortium presented current results concerning these technologies, which have already shown a clear progress towards development of new sustainable processes.
Project coordinator, LIST has developed and presented a new Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) based decision support tool. By quantifying the emissions of different technologies in a comprehensive way, this tool is expected to promote understanding of effects of the transition towards improved sustainability and circularity.
The next steps will be to assess the economic footprint of the developed technologies by Life Cycle Costing (LCC) tools and to define Circularity Indicators (CIs), that will illustrate and compare the degree of waste reduction & value maximization of different upgrading processes.
