A Case Study of LCA for Environmental Protection in Steel Company

In China, as sustainable development strategy being implemented, quantitative evaluation of environmental load in steel industry has paid been more and more attention. In this paper, Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) was applied in evaluation of the steel production process, analyzing the energy and materials consumption of Tangshan stainless steel industry in 2009. Based on inventory analysis, environment impact, global warming potential and human health influence were evaluated with three methods of Gabi4.3 software: EDIP, CML2001and Eco-indicator 99 (EI99). The results of LCA showed us that the high energy and pollution processes were iron-making, hot rolling and sintering, and the energy consumptions were 1166.22MJ, 837.92MJ and 633.45MJrespetively. Iron-making process was most harmful to environment and human health, so technological and managerial measures should be adopted to reduce the impact.