Hyundai Steel announced on December 15 that it has obtained the Norwegian EPD, one of Europe's leading global Environmental Product Declarations (EPDs), for its wire rod products.
The EPD is a system that quantitatively displays and discloses the environmental impacts of products and services from raw material extraction to production, distribution, use, and disposal, and is used as an indicator for consumers to choose environmentally friendly products.
At the ceremony to receive the Norwegian EPD certificate held at Hyundai Steel's Pangyo office, Mr. Roger Martinsen, Commercial Attaché of the Norwegian Embassy in Korea, attended the ceremony to present the certificate and discuss the status of major industries between the two countries and the realization of carbon neutrality.
In recent years, there has been a growing trend among industries to transparently disclose the environmental performance of their products by calculating and disclosing the environmental performance of their products.
In line with this trend, Hyundai Steel has been acquiring EPDs for the U.S. and Europe, two major markets for steel products, since 2019, and has secured EPDs for a total of 16 products in Korea, ranging from sheet metal to construction materials, to build a variety of options for Korean and overseas customers.
In general, wire rod products are produced through the blast furnace process, which melts iron ore, rather than the electric furnace process, which uses scrap as the main raw material to ensure quality. However, Hyundai Steel has been realizing both quality and carbon reduction by mixing high-purity iron ore from the blast furnace with the electric furnace process to produce products, and this EPD certification confirms the results.
In addition, Hyundai Steel is currently developing low-carbon tire cord steel that has been converted from conventional blast furnace products to electric furnace products through technical collaboration with Tire Cord, and is also in talks with a global electronics company to supply low-carbon wire rod products, and is actively developing and winning orders based on the advantages of quality and low carbon.
An official from Hyundai Steel said, "The demand for carbon information of steel products is expected to continue to increase in the carbon-neutral era, and we plan to continue to expand the acquisition of global environmental certifications such as EPD to respond to global environmental regulations such as the EU Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism (CBAM) and the US-EU Global Arrangement on Sustainable Steel and Aluminum (GSSA)."
