Dynamic Material Flow Analysis of Steel Resources in China Based on Circular Economy Theory

Abstract

The circular economy (CE) is a new development strategy for China to alleviate the contradiction between rapid economic growth and the shortage of raw materials and energy. As the basic material, steel is a key driver of the world's economy. Therefore, it is essential to set up CE indicators system to understand the mechanism of steel resources role in the circular economy. In this paper, a national level material flow evaluation framework based on CE theory is presented at the first. Then steel resources national lifetime cycle diagram is built based on dynamic Material Flow Analysis (MFA) method considering the steel lifetime circular flow characteristics. Under the guidance of this diagram, the material flow results of various stages (such as production process, fabrication & manufacturing process, in-use process, etc.) of steel lifetime cycle between 2001-2010 in China is obtained, including the end-of-life scarp amount of nine downstream industries. The results indicate that China steel resources has made gratifying achievements in improving productivity, reducing energy consumption and related pollution emission, but the degree of overall circulation remains to be improved urgently. In the end, a sketch of the future relevant policy recommendations are provided.

Cradle-to-cradle modeling of the future steel flow in China

“…These strategies are less metal with same service, more intense use, life extension, re-use of old scrap, fabrication scrap diversion, and fabrication yield improvement. While for China's steel industry, although similar studies have been conducted with the notion of 'Circular Economy' (Pauliuk et al, 2012;Wang et al, 2013), the implications of material efficiency and their detailed strategies are still vague for implementation.…”

Regional analysis of aluminum and steel flows into the American automotive industry

“…More specific aluminum MFAs have created trade‐linked maps of the contemporary global flows of aluminum (Liu & Müller, 2013), have combined trade‐linked multilevel MFA with life cycle assessment (LCA) to develop country‐level impact factors for primary aluminum consumption and production (Milovanoff et al., 2021), dynamically analyzed in‐use aluminum stocks at the product level (Chen, 2018), developed a world region tool to trace material flows of wrought and unwrought aluminum products (Bertram et al., 2017), and accounted for aluminum stocks and flows in US passenger vehicles and their implications for energy use (Cheah et al., 2009), but these MFAs do not define regional sources of aluminum entering a specific sector. Steel MFAs have helped inform circular economy theory (Pauliuk et al., 2012; Wang et al., 2013), identified regional distribution of steel scrap to be dependent on quality and application (Pauliuk et al., 2017), and developed a physical input–output method to identify a steel product and its location in an LDV (Nakamura et al., 2011), but literature on the regional distribution of steel material flows into a particular sector is lacking.…”