Abstract Understanding of the amount of steel scrap generation, usage, export–import flow, quality, and ultimately its net annual availability is essential for sustainable green steel production via electric arc furnace (EAF). This paper aims to determine these data for the context of Australia employing a systematic materials flow analysis approach combined with mass balance calculation. The paper also estimates the accumulation of tramp elements in the steel products after multiple scrap utilizations for different steel production scenarios of mixed blast furnace–basic oxygen furnace (BF-BOF) and EAF routes through computational equilibrium thermodynamics modeling. The study reveals that the annual Australia scrap generation within 2013–2022 was 4 Mt, dominated by scrap recovered at end-of-life (60%). It was estimated that the low residual scrap (sum of Cu, Sn, Cr, Ni, and Mo ≤ 0.25%) dominates scrap from manufacturing and fabrication. The tramp elements accumulation analysis predicted that in every scenario involving the BOF route, the concentrations of total tramp elements stabilize at certain values due to the dilution effect. The predicted maximum accumulation rates of tramp elements (Cu, Ni, Mo, and Sn) across all scenarios increased by 0.3 to 0.4%. The study also predicted that at an infinite number of cycles, higher EAF utilization leads to greater accumulated tramp elements, which become significant when the EAF portion reaches 70%. The study suggests that the scrap should be utilized locally by either increasing the EAF/BF-BOF production route ratio up to 0.7 or increasing the amount of scrap used in the BF-BOF route to support green steel circularity. Graphical Abstract
Mukhlis et al. (2026) studied this question.