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Adding value sustainably

Adding value sustainably

Good for the environment and for the customers

Whether a customised alloy concept, high-quality steel bars, precisely peeled bright steel sawn exactly as specified or CNC components delivered just in time and ready for installation: Excellent steel is sold in various forms along the complete value chain. Compared to many other manufacturers, GMH Gruppe produces its steel in an extremely sustainable manner along the entire value chain, thanks, among others, to maximum synergies within the Georgsmarienhütte location. This provides many benefits for the environment and for our customers – the five most important ones being:

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1. Optimum material cycle

The close cooperation of GMH Recycling GmbH at the Osnabrück location and Georgsmarienhütte GmbH is the foundation of our perfect material cycle. Steelmaking in our electric arc furnace is 100% scrap-based, which is more than twice the steel industry average. This is an important factor, given the fact that steel can be infinitely recycled. Using scrap as feedstock in electric steelmaking provides a significant advantage over the blast furnace route, which uses coal and iron ore to produce steel. These are valuable resources that even cause significantly higher emissions. In contrast to this, our steel’s carbon footprint becomes better every time it is recycled and so does the carbon footprint of the end products manufactured with it.

2. Efficient reduction of waste

As an energy-intensive company, we pay particular attention to conserving resources as best as possible. For many years, our energy and environmental management has been developing and improving measures to turn secondary products into valuable raw materials that can be sensibly reused. This works most efficiently at our Georgsmarienhütte location thanks to its short distances: Waste heat from our production is fed into the city’s district heating network and used to heat school and police department buildings, for example. In addition, slag from the electric arc furnace is used as material in road construction.

3. Short distances in production

At Georgsmarienhütte, recycling, steel production and further processing work closely hand in hand to make optimum products that meet exactly our customers’ specifications – in the most sustainable way possible. To guarantee this, we coordinate all production processes, from the scrap blend to the packaging of the finished products with the greatest possible care and foresight, last but not least in order to keep transport routes as short as possible. This save not only time but also CO2 emissions. Where other manufacturers have to use the service of subcontractors, which usually envolves long truck transports from one production stage to the next, we simply combine the various production stages “under one roof” at our Georgsmarienhütte location.

No long transports

  • from processing black into peeled material
  • from cutting to customised lengths
  • through to customised, ready-to-install CNC components

104 kilograms of CO2

is what we save by avoiding every 100 kilometers driven by a fully loaded truck. In other words, referred to our annual production, we avoid the emissions otherwise arising from some 4,000 trucks.

4. Climate-friendly transports

Besides our synergies right at the Georgsmarienhütte location, we save emissions in various other ways. We use climate-friendly transport by rail wherever possible. Even today we transport 90% of the scrap for our electric arc furnace by rail. We also deliver the finished products to our customers preferably by rail, to relieve roads and motorways.

5. Geographic proximity

Working closely hand in hand across our Georgsmarien location is one of the reason why we can make products of unsurpassed quality. The same applies for sustainability. As an example, we have newly established a task force that is responsible for all sustainability issues and reports directly to management. The members of this team have developed the new sustainability strategy for our Georgsmarienhütte location, and are responsible for drawing up the sustainability report. 
In future, additional synergies will result from a new order management centre, which will ensure maximum flexibility and service in handling our customers’ requirements – all from a single source. For our customers this means that they can further increase the sustainability of their end products thanks to our  – in comparison - low-CO2 steel production – without any compromise on the excellent quality and on-time delivery performance we provide.

Added value achieved with maximum sustainability

Whether semi-finished products, sawn bright steel, or ready-to-install CNC-machined components: As a customer, you may decide up to which stage you want to benefit from our value-adding chain at Georgsmarienhütte – inclusive of the greatest possible sustainability in steel production.

Transparency: Our Sustainability Report

How do we protect natural resources? How do we live up to our social responsibility? What long-term sustainability strategy do we pursue? We answer this and numerous other questions in our Sustainability Report 2019. This sixty-page report, entitled "Naturally committed. To the future, naturally." is available for download in PDF format.

Sustainability Report 2019 Georgsmarienhütte GmbH

Tangible sustainability: Our products

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Learn more about our sustainability strategy – get in touch with us.

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Contact

Luciana Filizzola

Director Sustainability and Communications