Management of recycling operations for iron and steel making slags

Iron and steelmaking slags constitute important by-products of iron and steel production. Since slags are indispensable to iron and steel making processes, established recycling alternatives can be used to convert accruing slags to secondary resources, such as road construction materials, cements and fertilizers. The potential of a recycling alternative depends on a multitude of technical, economic and ecological influencing factors. In short-term production planning, the concurrence of these factors leads to the question how slags are to be recycled. The focus of this contribution is set on developing an adequate recycling planning approach based on techno-economic modelling. By combining activity analysis and flowsheet simulation, a modelling methodology is derived, which allows to model mechanical recycling processes characterized by particle size distributions. Further, management accounting and price functions are used to describe the occurring recycling costs and revenues for secondary resources, which are characterized by regional market structures. The developed concept is incorporated into a decision model, which is used in an illustrative example.