POSCO Future M cut greenhouse gases 8.6% in 2022

South Korea's chemical company POSCO Future M Co. last year lowered greenhouse gases a surprising 8.6% from 2021. Reducing its CO2 emissions despite posting a 66% surge in sales in 2022, the company attributed the lower figure to its expansion of renewable energy use and raw material recycling.

Its Corporate Citizenship Report released on Sunday said POSCO Future M last year emitted 2,232,308 tons of CO2 equivalent of greenhouse gases based on Scope 1 and 2, down 8.6% from 2,441,598 in 2021. The level of emissions increased 7.5% from 2020-21 but fell significantly a year later.

The company's sales surged from 1.5 trillion won ($1.2 billion) in 2020 to 1.9 trillion won in 2021 and 3.3 trillion won last year, breaking the conventional notion that CO2 emissions rise in tandem with higher plant operation due to more sales.

The company said a direct factor in reducing emissions was its 27% increase in the use of renewable energy from 2021. It installed last year a solar-powered facility with annual capacity of 130 megawatt hours at its cathode material plant in Sejong.

This year, it will build another solar-powered facility with annual capacity of 2,864 MWh at its cathode material plant in Gwangyang, South Jeolla Province. The conversion of the fuel used in the refractory firing process to liquefied natural gas also contributed to greener operations.

In addition, the recycling of graphite powder, a by-product in cathode material output, also reduced resource consumption.

In addition to reducing CO2 emissions, POSCO Future M also lowered a variety of pollutants. It halved its volume of water pollutants from 327 tons in 2021 to 163 last year and that of air pollutants from 965 to 460, with overall waste cut from 336,659 to 311,144 over the same period.

Write to Hyung-Kyu Kim at khk@hankyung.com