Circular Economy in Climate Protection Scenarios for the Steel and Chemicals Industry

Although circularity measures are widely recognised as an important pillar for greenhouse gas mitigation in the heavy industry, their actual implementation still stands at a very low level. Currently, the issue is gaining momentum and projections of long-term pathways towards a carbon neutral heavy industry increasingly integrate circularity. However, most of these existing scenario studies at best include a few circularity measures but usually no coherent circular economy (CE) strategy. Therefore, together with SCI4climate.NRW, the REINVENT project aims at initiating pioneering work in this field. The project partners will create location-specific CE scenarios for a future carbon neutral steel and chemicals industry.

In the framework of the workshop, the project partners will connect the steel and chemicals industry with emission mitigating CE measures to create consistent and viable future CE pathways. Basing on the potential development of material demand (steel, plastics), they will discuss how that demand could be met: which types of processes, technologies and emission mitigation strategies might be implemented, including the potential for recycling etc.
Furthermore, feasible combinations of pathways and related timelines as well as potential forerunning regions should be identified. In order to achieve this, the project partners combine the unique knowledge of the SCI4climate.NRW and REINVENT projects, thus inviting experts from North Rhine-Westphalia (NRW) and different European countries from industry, science and society. The results of the discussion will provide valuable input to scenario storylines for the EU framework scenarios to be calculated in REINVENT (by Wuppertal Institute and PBL Netherlands Environmental Assessment Agency) and also for NRW scenarios to be developed later on in SCI4climate.NRW.

The workshop will take place on 14 June at the Wuppertal Institute from 10 am to 4 pm. Further information on REINVENT and SCI4climate.NRW can be found in the following links.