Tracing China's steel use from steel flows in the production system to steel footprints in the consumption system

Realizing the conservation and circulation of steel is of great significance to the global low-carbon and sustainable development, which requires the joint efforts from both the supply and demand sides. The first step for these efforts begins with the in-depth understanding of the steel use panorama, including steel flows in the production system and steel footprints in the consumption system. This study provides a unified methodological basis for tracing and analysing the steel use from production to consumption, taking China as a case study. By combing material flow analysis with the extended input-output approach, this study traced China's steel use from iron ore, intermediate products, end-use products to direct consumption, embodied consumption and final use in 2018. Based on this, policy implications for China's steel sustainable development were put forward from both supply and demand sides. The results indicate that investment drove 75.1% of China's steel production; construction accounted for 58.6% of China's direct steel consumption; the service industry's embodied steel consumption accounted for 6.8% of China's total steel consumption, although without direct steel consumption; and scrap accounted for 21.5% of China's steel sources, of which 56.7% entered basic oxygen furnaces rather than electric arc furnaces. Therefore, transforming economic growth model is crucial to reducing steel demand. Currently, construction should be the focus of efforts to improve material efficiency, while in the future, policies should guide the dematerialization of the service. From the perspective of production, the pathway lock-in should be broken for promoting China's steel recycling and low-carbon development.