Towards sustainability in the steel sector: identifying criteria for assessing early design servitization opportunities

Steel is one of the materials most present in people's lives, with many and various applications, such as buildings, infrastructure, transport, machinery and consumer goods. However, steel production is a highly energy-intensive industrial activity, which makes the steel sector one of the most closely watched in this period of great attention to sustainability issues. Despite several measures can be implemented to limit industrial processes’ impacts on sustainability, many authors pointed out that the shift from selling products to providing services could be a successful choice to incentivize companies to adopt more sustainable business models and operations. Since the steel industry is still quite backward in terms of servitization, the objective of this paper is to boost the adoption of sustainable servitized business models, by identifying a set of evaluation criteria for servitization opportunities in the early design phase within this sector. The investigated criteria are expected to be able to feed several methods to assess all the sustainability performance of a servitized business model, according to the triple bottom line definition, thus taking into account the economic, environmental and social dimensions of sustainability. A systematic literature review was conducted, followed by expert interviews with specialists in the steel industry. The review identified 51 distinct criteria from the literature, which were categorized based on provider and customer perspectives, as well as the three dimensions of sustainability according to the triple bottom line definition. The expert interviews validated and rated the criteria set, revealing the significance of economic ones from both customer and provider perspectives. The findings provide guidance for steel companies in evaluating servitization opportunities.