Keynotes

Pierre-Jean Krauth, ArcelorMittal, FR

Digital Transformation: A Human‑Centered Industrial Evolution

ArcelorMittal France is driving a major digital transformation designed to modernize its industrial operations while firmly placing people at the heart of this evolution. Through two regional Digital Labs, we empower employees to explore, test and adopt advanced Industry 4.0 technologies—from AI and data science to IoT, robotics and immersive training. Our Digital Academy develops digital skills for all profiles, ensuring that every employee can understand, master and benefit from new tools. By fostering co‑development with startups, academic partners and industrial ecosystems, we create inclusive innovation rooted in the realities of the shop floor. This human‑centered approach strengthens safety, competence, employability and engagement across all sites, making digital transformation an enabler for both industrial excellence and personal development.

Gang LIU, Beijing University, CN

Going beyond criticality: Managing mineral supply chains require whole-chain governance to curb risk leakage and governance failure

Critical minerals now sit at the vortex of climate ambition and geopolitical competition. Lithium, cobalt, nickel and rare earth elements underpin electric vehicles, wind turbines, storage, grids for renewable energy transition; data centers and power electronics for digital economy; and many defense and aerospace applications. They are considered “critical” or “strategic” because they are both indispensable and vulnerable to disruption. But criticality is still too often framed as only resource or geopolitical problem: which minerals are scarce, where dependence is concentrated, and how supply can be secured. In this talk, I will elaborate on why they fail to explain how risks move across value chain stages, how efforts to address one problem can shift pressure elsewhere, and how fragmented interventions can create new vulnerabilities, and thus argue that managing mineral supply chains require whole-chain governance to curb risk leakage and governance failure.

Marcel Genet, Laplace Conseil, FR

Scrap is the future of Steel

The steel industry is a major contributor to CO2 and other GHG emissions. Estimates of CO2 range from 8 to 11% of global emissions, while indirect methane emissions are rarely quantified. These variations largely depend on the “scope” used to quantify the steel industry’s impact, including iron ore and coal mining, as well as natural gas, electricity, alloys, and minerals used in the steelmaking process.
Recycling post-consumer scrap is generally accepted as the most environmentally friendly way to reduce the industry’s emissions. However, greater use of recycled materials is challenged by the perception among many industry participants that there are not enough recycled raw materials (RRM) available at a low enough price to meet substantially increased demand, and also, that the quality of these RRM is insufficient to produce some of the highest steel grades demanded by consumers.
This paper will briefly review the metallurgical process routes available to produce the wide range of steels sold today for thousands of applications (construction, transportation, etc.) and the constraints that determine the extent of recycling, the availability of RRMs, and the strategic, economic, cultural, and societal contexts.
It will assess the existence and quantify the magnitude of “urban scrap mines” as a growing renewable resource, particularly in countries and regions with older industrialization. Further, it will identify the cost (capex and opex) of extracting the greatest economic reserve from these resources and the technologies necessary to lower those costs. 
Building on the SAM’s mission and objectives, the paper will explore interactions among countries and citizens’ attitudes toward environmental protection, climate change and profit motivation, and the resulting efforts and successes in exploiting their urban scrap mines.