Groundbreaking success
for sustainable mobility
“Green” rails for the most highly advanced rail networks
The 2024 Summer Olympics in Paris are intended to be climate-friendly. The organizers plan to emit only half as much CO2 as was emitted during the Games in London (2012) and Rio (2016). To achieve this while also making Paris more climate-friendly in the future, the metro is being rapidly expanded. The “Grand Paris Express” megaproject is set to expand the existing route network by 100 percent with four new lines. The rails used for this largest infrastructure project in Europe are themselves “green”: they come from Saarstahl Rail.
The Saarstahl subsidiary in Hayange in France’s Lorraine region is part of the Pure Steel+ family and specializes in rail networks of all kinds. Saarstahl Rail has more than 100 different rail profiles in its portfolio and 25 steel grades with metallurgical and mechanical properties tailored to the respective customer specifications.
“Green” thanks to 100 percent recycled steel scrap and production in an electric furnace
For its green steel, scrap steel from various railroad networks is melted down in Saarstahl Ascoval’s electric arc furnace without the use of iron ore or coal. It is then delivered to Hayange, where Saarstahl Rail forms the green rails. This is environmentally friendly, as it eliminates around 70 percent of the carbon emitted by conventional production process.
20,000 tons of green rails have already been supplied by Saarstahl Rail for the Grand Paris Express. This includes the first low-carbon (“bas carbone”) metro line in Paris – the new line 16 – which connects the north of the metropolis with the east in a 26-kilometer arc.
The French railroad rolls on green rails
But the Paris metro is not the only line that runs on climate-friendly tracks from Saarstahl Rail. Since 2020, all major line renewal projects in the French rail network have been implemented with green rails. As part of a seven-year contract, SNCF Réseau orders around 130,000 tons of rails (2,800 kilometers of track) from Saarstahl Rail every year. In 2023, around 90 percent (125,000 tons) of these were already green rails. This has enabled the rail network operator to cut around 200,000 tons of CO2 emissions. Pure Steel+ is successfully accelerating the ecological mobility transition with green steel.