Ekinciler proposes Hatay plant to recover zinc oxide from arc-furnace dust

What happened

Ekinciler Demir ve Çelik Sanayi A.Ş. intends to build a recovery unit at its operating integrated iron and steel site in Sarıseki, within the İskenderun Organised Industrial Zone in Hatay. The installation is intended to extract zinc from dust captured from the steelworks’ electric arc furnace.

According to Enerji Günlüğü, the proposal carries an estimated investment of about 342 million Turkish lira. The company plans to use pyrometallurgical and hydrometallurgical processing to separate zinc from the dust and produce a marketable zinc oxide product.

Planned annual production is approximately 10,000 tonnes of zinc oxide at 63% purity. The facility would use 22,500 tonnes of electric arc furnace dust and 4,500 tonnes of anthracite each year. Processing would also produce around 17,000 tonnes a year of iron-rich Waelz slag.

Why it matters

The project would establish a dedicated processing route for a dust stream generated at Ekinciler’s existing steel operation, with zinc recovered into a commercial product. It illustrates how electric arc furnace dust can be treated as a potential source of recoverable material rather than managed only as a residual output.

The intended handling of the Waelz slag remains subject to analysis under Türkiye’s Waste Management Regulation. If the assessment finds that recovery is feasible, the material is to be transferred to licensed recovery facilities. If it is not considered suitable for recovery, it would be sent to the company’s existing slag storage area.

For steel and circular-materials professionals, the next point to track is whether the planned unit proceeds and how the required slag analysis determines the downstream route for its principal process residue.

Project context

The proposed recovery installation would be located inside Ekinciler’s current industrial footprint rather than at a separate site. Its feedstock would come from electric arc furnace dust generated by the existing integrated steelworks, linking the recovery process directly to the plant’s current operations.