It's not often steel companies communicate creatively. In fact, they barely even do advertising at all. But to do things differently turned out to be the right thing for SSAB since Pure Waste is their most successful campaign so far.

What previously only had existed in long and complex documents was now made both graspable and drinkable. Something so simple as water became a tangible proof of how the heavy steel industry can go from CO2  H2O.

If the steel industry will have any chance of meeting climate agreements, it needs to cut its emissions. Fast. Today the sector is responsible for a whopping 7% of the world’s total carbon dioxide emissions.

As the demand for steel is rising, Sweden’s biggest steel company, SSAB is committed to doing their part. Together with the country’s biggest mining corporation and energy producers, LKAB and Vattenfall, they have managed to create the world’s first fossil-free steel. By replacing the traditionally used coking coal with hydrogen, the by-product becomes water instead of carbon dioxide emissions.

The magnitude of this game-changing technology is difficult for people even within the sector to fully grasp. So, to make this shift both graspable and visible, we decided to bottle our emissions.

Pure Waste contains the by-product from our fossil-free steel production, collected at our pilot plant in Luleå in Sweden. The very first water, with a lasting taste of change.

The limited-edition water was launched at the UN Climate Change Conference in Sharm El Sheikh, Egypt. To show the water’s purity to all delegates, SSAB’s Executive Vice President and CTO – Martin Pei, was the first person to drink it.

The steel industry stands for 7% of the world’s CO2 emissions. It’s considered to be a hard-to-abate industry by the UN, meaning the sector is extremely hard to decarbonize. But with the new, fossil-free steel, everything is truly changing.

To make people fully understand the greatness of fossil-free steel, they first need to understand what differentiates it from regular steel. Since the steel qualities are the same, the only difference is that instead of emitting CO2 as part of the process, the waste from the fossil-free steel is water.

Therefore, our creative strategy was simply this: From CO2  H2O.

The limited edition “Pure Waste” Water was launched in November 2022 at the UN climate conference where all world leaders were gathered to discuss the greatest challenge of our time. The man behind the fossil-free steel, Martin Pei, was there and to show the water’s purity to all delegates, he was the first person ever to drink it. Simultaneously, we spread the initiative through ads, media outlets and influencers. All leading to our hub, where people could take part in the initiative.

There’s an instant friction between something so simple as water and one of the biggest challenges of our time. A friction that resulted in the news about Pure Waste travelled across the globe at the speed of light. At the time of writing, the campaign has resulted in 81 articles in countries such as US, Italy, Sweden, France and Germany to name a few. The initiative’s estimated reach is approximately 599 million impressions.

1.1 million people read the native articles written about Pure Waste. The readers spent an average whopping 2.54 dwell time reading the articles. The films have more than 90 million views and counting, including.

all formats and platforms.

Steel companies usually doesn’t do creative advertising. Instead, everything they do is extremely product oriented. With the Pure Waste campaign, we did the exact opposite. Instead of just showing a piece of fossil-free steel we embodied its emissions. By doing so, we turned something earlier ungraspable into both graspable and drinkable.

No other company could have done this idea. Why? Because SSAB is the only steel company in the world who has managed to produce fossil-free steel. But for the sake of the planet’s future, hopefully more steel companies will be able to drink their own emissions one day.