The blast furnace is the most important process for the production of hot metal. An integral part of this process route is the coking of coal and sintering of fine ore. The FINEX®‐process is a new technology for hot metal production which uses untreated fine ores and coal instead of sinter and coke. This paper deals with the investigation of integration concepts of the blast furnace and FINEX®. Low reduced iron (LRI) and/or reducing gas are/is produced in FINEX® and are/is considered as substitute/s of burden and fuel in the blast furnace, respectively. In the article the overall fuel demand and CO2 emissions for the integration of the blast furnace and FINEX® are shown. For that reason two case studies for the integration are carried out and compared with the base case, that is, the two‐independent processes. The CO2 emissions are calculated considering the fuel and electric power consumption of the different cases.

By using waste materials as alternative fuels in metallurgical plants it is possible to minimize the traditionally used reducing agents, such as coke, coal, oil or natural gas. Moreover, by using waste materials in the metallurgical industry it is feasible to recover these materials as far as possible. This also represents another step towards environmental protection because carbon dioxide emissions can be reduced, if the H(2) content of the waste material is greater in comparison with that of the substituted fuel and the effects of global warming can therefore be reduced. In the present article various solid recovered fuels and their applications in the metallurgical industry are detailed.

The RecoDust process is a pyrometallurgical approach for the treatment of heavy metal–containing basic oxygen furnace dusts (BOFD) and delivers two products without any residues: the iron rich RecoDust slag and a zinc rich filter dust, called crude zinc oxide (CZO). The state of the art Waelz process has some disadvantages and is only suitable for dusts with zinc contents >15%. Within the frame of a project of the Austrian competence center program K1‐MET and with financial support of voestalpine Stahl, a RecoDust pilot plant is operated at the Chair of Thermal Processing technology at the Montanuniversitaet Leoben and has shown good dezincification rates of BOFD in eleven smelting campaigns with a throughput up to 300 kg h−1. The target is the design of an industrial plant with a throughput capacity of 1000 kg h−1 in the next years. For the upscale, a new pneumatic conveying system was installed at the pilot plant, which uses natural gas as conveying medium. The commissioning of the developed pilot plant was successful and revealed a good product quality of the CZO. An enhanced dezincification of the RecoDust slag is one open challenge, therefore the dust feed conveying must be more precise.

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