JFE Technologies and Products Contributing to Environmental Preservation

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The JFE Group helps preserve the integrity of the global environment by providing leading-edge technologies, products and services.

In its quest to help build a sustainable society, JFE implements measures to counter global warming. These include not only harnessing technologies accumulated through its steelmaking and engineering activities to reduce emissions of carbon dioxide in its own business activities, but also providing its own steel products and engineering technologies to help reduce carbon dioxide emissions throughout society as a whole.

In addition, in the industrial complexes in which its steelworks are located, it collaborates with neighboring companies and local municipalities to raise recovery ratios for resources and energy, and actively helps create urban environments in which both carbon dioxide emissions and waste are minimized.

Contributions by Steel Products

Through steelmaking processes entailing low environmental loads, the JFE Group manufactures and supplies the community with steel products that contribute to the sustainability of the global environment. For example, it helps to prevent global warming through the supply of high-tensile strength steel sheet that facilitates weight-reduction in automobiles, high-efficiency electrical steel sheet that can be used in motors and other machinery to save electric power, and high-purity silicon for solar cells.

Contributions by Engineering Technologies

The supply of engineering technologies and products developed by the JFE Group helps lower the environmental load globally and prevent global warming. These include technologies for the removal of dioxins and other toxic substances, renewable-energy technologies such as for biomass power generation and wind power generation, and an energy-saving air-conditioning system using hydrate slurry.

Resource Recycling Business

Based on JFE steelmaking and engineering technologies, group companies engage in the recycling of waste discarded by local municipalities and other companies in their localities. The diverse and distinctive recycling activities undertaken include recycling waste plastics for blast furnaces feed; producing NF board for concrete forms manufactured from recycled plastic; recycling polyvinyl chloride, PET bottles and home appliances; melting and gasifying combustible waste; and utilizing biomass thermal methods employing food waste. In this way, group companies play an important role in the sustained recycling of resources in their local regions.

DME - Next-Generation Clean Energy

The JFE Group is actively developing production technologies for dimethyl ether (DME), currently a focus of attention as a clean fuel in the near future, and is promoting its widespread use. DME can be produced from a variety of hydrocarbon materials, and a wide range of uses are envisaged for it, including as fuel for power generation, for diesel engines, and for household use, and as a raw material for the production of chemicals.

Used as diesel fuel, it is a form of clean energy with an extremely small environmental load, since during combustion it generates no sulfur oxides (SOx) or particulate matter (PM). At the JFE Steel East Japan Works, the practical use of a DME-fueled truck equipped with a crane has begun.