Italian long steel producer Alfa Acciai group presented yesterday, December 14, its first sustainability report, a tool used by an increasing number of industry players in the past few years to inform stakeholders about company performance in economic, social and environmental terms.
The first document of this type for Alfa Acciai refers to the financial years 2019 and 2020, is about 100 pages long and includes all companies operating within the Alfa Acciai Group i.e., Alfa Acciai and its subsidiaries Acciaierie di Sicilia, Alfa Derivati, Ferroberica, and Tecnofil. The report commences with a letter to the stakeholders signed by president Ettore Lonati and CEO Amato Stabiumi, stating that "environmental, social and economic sustainability permeates all of our tasks and strategies, be it new investment or procedural change, because it has always been in our corporate culture."
At the beginning of the conference, president Lonati said that Alfa Acciai lives in a difficult context: the Brescia-based plant is surrounded by houses and for this reason, compared to many other competitors, it began very early to invest heavily in environmental sustainability. Clara Stabiumi, member of the board of Alfa Acciai, explained how the idea of adopting a sustainability report was born: "The need to communicate everything we do was born in April this year. Corporate social responsibility has been inherent in the company always, but with the pandemic outbreak the importance of companies as safe places has been understood at the population level." At the beginning of the health crisis, Alfa Acciai stopped its activities voluntarily, anticipating the government's indications in the light of the serious situation that was occurring in Brescia, after which the group adopted a protocol of conduct and organized a specific commission, to safely manage the restart and all subsequent phases. "We decided to make an effort to talk about all this and more. We therefore carried out brainstorming activities to define sustainability issues that are relevant to both the group and its stakeholders. It was a joint effort in which the individual companies of the group were involved," explained Clara Stabiumi.
Giuseppe Cavalli stated that in 2020, the year of the outbreak of the Covid-19 emergency, Alfa Acciai continued to invest and, in the final part of the year, the company even hired over one hundred people. He then stated, "There is a lot of talk about circularity nowadays, but an electro-steel company is sustainable and circular par excellence, because it derives from the recycling of scrap. 97 percent of the finished product is in fact the result of the recycling of waste materials." Alongside this "primary circularity", he continued, "we are introducing super circularity logics, such as the recovery of smoke dust, slag and a series of other materials. The most significant example concerns the experimentation in heat recovery. In collaboration with A2A Calore e Servizi, the University of Brescia and District Heating Planet, and with the support of the Lombardy Region, Alfa Acciai has achieved the creation of an innovative and efficient prototype system for recovering the heat coming from the cooling system of the steel mill and to transfer it to the Brescia city district heating network. The results are proving to be extremely positive. The project will be fully implemented in the coming years, and will enable heat recovery up to 20 MW for an amount of approximately 60,000 MWh/year, equivalent to the requirements of 6,000 similar apartment flats.
At the end of the press conference, president Lonati expressed some concerns for the future in relation to the issue of energy. "Since October, the tsunami caused by the rise in electricity prices has impacted on our financial results, which had been very satisfactory up to that point. We are talking about a price that yesterday reached €320 per MW, while a few months ago it stood at €40-50 per MW. We do not know how long this situation will last and what is causing it. If it were speculation, someone would have to intervene. In addition, scrap prices have almost doubled, while the price of gas is eight times the previous price," said Lonati. The company is also worried about competition with Turkey, "which has experienced a far lower increase in the cost of energy and which is pressing on the borders of eastern Europe, putting our presence in that market at risk," explained Alfa Acciai's president.