Steel stocks and flows of global merchant fleets as material base of international trade from 1980-2050
Abstract
The booming international trade drives the expansion of merchant fleets that relies heavily on steel and other materials. This study presents the first analysis of steel stocks and flows of global ships from 1980 to 2019, and further project the generation of steel scraps from global shipbreaking by 2050 under five shared socioeconomic pathways (SSPs). We found that the in-use stock of steel on ships in developing economies increase 4.24 times in the study period, as the main drivers of the global ship stock growth. However, a transition from oil tankers to container ships and bulk carriers tended to reduce the in-use steel stocks due to their smaller steel intensity. The rapid increase of ship stocks was followed by booming generation of scraped steel, reached 9.9 Mt/year in 2019. Based on SSP scenarios, our projections indicate the steel from scrapped ships worldwide will increase by around 4-fold by 2050, which may impose a great challenge on material recycling coordination, thus requires long-term planning of ship recycling facility development. Our results call for sustainable methods to recycle steel to realize the steel development of circular economy. Our study provides insights for the steel waste and recycling management of end-of-life ships worldwide.
Author(s)
| Name |
Affiliation |
|
Xianghui Kong
|
Institute of Blue and Green Development, Shandong University |
|
K Feng
|
University of Maryland, College Park |
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