Sustainable Utilization of Steel Slag: Global Production, Applications, and Economic Benefits

In recent years, we hear more and more talk about pollution, but especially about what it produces on the environment and implicitly on people's health. All the states of the world, especially the developed ones, are taking increasingly drastic measures to protect the environment. The world's population has grown, its needs have grown, industry has tried to keep up and has also developed to produce much more than 100 years ago, but what do we do with the waste that results from the production process? Industry is the biggest polluter today, waste from the metallurgical industry has multiplied at an accelerated rate lately and has come to represent a real problem. What would it be like if this problem disappeared and also generated a significant economy of other materials? The article shows how an industrial waste, steel slag, can be used in several fields, especially in the construction of roads which is a big consumer of resources, both reducing costs for them and solving the problem of occupying ever larger spaces for slag storage. The study shows the amount of steel slag produced by several countries in the world, how much of it is recycled by each mentioned country and for what purpose, also giving some examples of roads where this waste was used.