Pure Waste™

Taking the steel industry from CO₂ to H₂O

3,6 billion tonnes. That’s how much carbon dioxide emissions the steel industry emits every year. A carbon footprint three times bigger than the total aviation sector.

As the steel demand is rising, Sweden’s biggest steel company, SSAB, has decided to challenge the industry by creating the world’s first fossil-free steel.

Instead of emitting C0₂ as part of the process, the waste is now water. To show this huge shift, we bottled the emissions. Pure Waste™ contains the by-product from the fossil-free steel production, collected at the SSAB pilot plant in Luleå, Sweden.

“Today, steel is used everywhere, and demand is predicted to increase even more. The challenge is that the steel industry accounts for 7% of all global CO₂ emissions. But we now have a solution to this problem. By focusing on the change we can make, we want to create engagement outside our category and reach more stakeholders.” says Fredrik Thor, Head of Corporate Brand and Marketing at SSAB.

We brought the bottle to the UN Climate Change Conference (UNCOP27). To show the factory water’s purity to all delegates, Martin Pei, the Vice President of SSAB, drank it on stage for the world to see. 

“As we learned more about the technology behind the making of fossil-free steel, we realized that the magic was the process rather than the end product. The quality of the steel remains the same, but the by-product is water instead of CO₂. That change is something everyone can understand and relate to,” says Carl Laurén, creative at Forsman & Bodenfors Stockholm.