To further reduce its carbon footprint, Bulten has signed an agreement with the Dutch wire rod manufacturer, FNsteel. The deal gives Bulten access to the most circular steel on the market for its own fastener production and enables the company to offer its customers a greener product option.
“The partnership with FNsteel, which has been ongoing for a little over a year, is an important step toward achieving our vision to create the most innovative and sustainable fastener solutions. We have long worked with scrap-based steel when manufacturing our products, but with this new steel we can provide customers with an even more circular alternative. This gives us a competitive edge as we are pioneers for this in our industry,” says Emmy Pavlovic, CTO Bulten Group.
The uniqueness of the wire rod that Bulten now can access is that the steel is based on 60-80% recycled scrap from end-of-life products and is made using fossil-free electricity. This can be compared to the most common scrap-based wire rod used in fastener production today, which is usually based on steel scrap from industrial manufacturing processes. This enables Bulten to take a critical step toward a product offering based on material with less than 300 kg carbon dioxide per ton of steel, a milestone on the way to carbon neutrality.
“This exciting collaboration allows end use customers to access a truly bespoke green product which is best in class from a carbon footprint perspective when compared to any alternative in the market,” says Matthijs van der Schoot, Managing Director FNsteel.
Bulten’s agreement with FNsteel runs for three years and will have a major impact for Bulten when it comes to achieving its Scope 3 emissions target, which is to reduce emissions from suppliers by 25% per ton of products sold by 2030. The wire rod will mainly be used to produce fasteners for the automotive industry at Bulten’s European plants. These currently account for the majority of the company’s global production volumes.
