A truck carrying coffee grounds for recycling. Courtesy of Hyundai Steel

By Lee Kyung-min

Hyundai Steel, the steelmaking and iron mill affiliate of Hyundai Motor Group, is accelerating efforts for carbon neutrality, as illustrated by its recycling of coffee grounds, cow dung and waste sludge from semiconductor manufacturing.

The firm signed a memorandum of understanding with Incheon Metropolitan City last month, to cooperate in a study whereby used coffee grounds in the city will be used to reduce odors from animal waste at farms. They will be sent to a North Gyeongsang branch office of the Korea Institute for Health and Social Affairs, a state-run research organization.

Data from the organization showed that the coffee grounds can reduce animal waste odors by 95 percent.

Korea imports about 150,000 tons of coffee beans every year, but only 0.2 percent of them are used to extract coffee. The remaining 99.8 percent are thrown away in landfills.

"Coffee grounds have been treated as nothing but household waste, but are now being recognized as a sustainable resource," a Hyundai Steel official said. "We will continue to identify various green, sustainable social contribution projects in line with our firm, defined by sustainable resource utilization."

Similarly, the firm has begun to use cow dung as fuel for blast furnaces, a project stalled for nine years due to questionable economic feasibility and technological flaws.

Hyundai Steel, the Ministry of Agriculture, Food and Rural Affairs and the National Agricultural Cooperative Federation agreed to begin using dung in steel manufacturing before the year's end.

Korea produces about 22 million tons of cow dung every year, accounting for over 2 million tons of annual greenhouse gas emissions. Most is used as fertilizer.

However, alternative utilization will see 4 tons of dung being recycled to make 1 ton of blast furnace fuel.

The last feat was achieved jointly by Hyundai Steel, global tech giant Samsung Electronics and POS Ceramics, a local industrial by-product processor and recycler.

The three have developed a new technology that can reuse wastewater sludge from semiconductor manufacturing as input material for steel manufacturing.

The sludge contained fluorspar, a common raw material used in ironmaking and steelmaking.

Hyundai relies exclusively on South America and China for imports of fluorspar, but the three-way cooperative initiative can reduce the import amount to 10,000 tons, half of its annual figure of 20,000 tons.