DETERMINATION OF ENVIRONMENTAL ASPECTS IN METALLURGICAL INDUSTRY

In production processes used materials and final products must be assessed to discover whether they complete the expected technical objectives, contribute to the expected economic performance and whether environmental expectations and requirements have been met. It is essential to find suitable attitudes to improve the used materials and final products characteristics, especially by means of system-controlled processes. Economic performance have typically been dealt with by means of well-known and sophisticated financial and marketing analysis methods, while technology and engineering methods are used for technical aspects assessment. On the other hand environmental requirements have often been neglected if not completely missing. There exist several generic attitudes to support assessment methods involving the connected economic and environmental criteria. Many companies in metallurgy introduce environmental management systems and environmental accounting in consideration of potential savings and avoiding material wastage. But effective environmental management system should bring more information, especially about all relevant and important environmental aspects of company's production processes. The contribution deals with the assessment of environmental aspects of metallurgical materials production and their impact on environment. The main objective is to determine optimized ways of selection and evaluation of sustainability aspects for company materials and products to reinforce company competitiveness, environmental performance and sustainability. The opportunity to save costs and the effort to prevent rare materials wastage seems to be a strong motivation for the improvement of company's environmental performance; therefore the improvement of the corporate assessment processes is an inevitable step on the way to environmentally responsible company.