Our products and the environment
Steel plays a vital role in the global economy and is one of the cornerstones in the development of modern society. Products containing steel are all around us in our daily life. Due to their unique properties, our products cause reduced environmental impact by enabling the end products to be lighter, and to have a higher load-carrying capacity and a longer useful life.

Highest quality
Steel products from SSAB Oxelösund are among the foremost in the world. By using our steels, engineers can design their products so that they are lighter and more wear resistant, but with unchanged performance. Our customers thus gain obvious environmental benefits. As an example, vehicles made of high quality steel cause less wear on the roads and also consume less fuel, since they are lighter. Steel is an excellent closed-loop material, since it can be recycled time after time without its properties being impaired.

Perpetual material
Society has well-developed systems for collecting and recycling steel scrap. More than 40 percent of the world’s steel production is currently based on such recycled steel scrap. The percentage is about the same for the steel produced in Sweden. In Oxelösund, steel scrap accounts for about 20 percent of the volume produced. For further information, visit the home page of the Swedish Institute of Steel Construction at www.sbi.se

Reliable
Iron products have been in use for about 4000 years and are still used in all industries, which demonstrates the reliability and usefulness of the material. Steel is by far the world’s most widely used structural material and can be recycled an unlimited number of times without losing any of its unique properties. Steel can be recycled more than any other structural material. Since the Swedish mining industry has no opencast iron ore mines, its impact on our valuable nature is minimal. Out of the known iron deposits of around 7000 million tonnes, 12 million tonnes annually are mined in Sweden.

Recycled products with competitive properties
The production of steel at SSAB Oxelösund AB generates around 600 000 tonnes of residual products annually, and around 90 percent of these are recovered or processed further into various products.

The main objective is to minimize the amounts going to landfill by increasing the in-house recycling and by looking for commercial outlets for recycling or recovering the products. For many years, the SSAB subsidiary Merox has been devoting determined work to increasing the degree of recovery and further processing. Merox products are sold on a competitive commercial market on which the focus is on the performance of the materials. There are fields of application in areas such as roadbuilding, paint pigments, electronics, soil stabilization, cement raw materials, and so on.