Lars Baumgürtel, Managing Partner of the ZINQ Group, Interview: Robert Piterek
You spoke to Minister Robert Habeck some time ago about the current situation. How do you see industrial policy since then?
There is now more supply of gas. Robert Habeck has also gone beyond ideological boundaries when you look at where the substitution volumes for Russian gas are coming from. LNG terminals are also being built, which can later be converted to hydrogen. We also discussed how the speculatively driven raw materials market can be brought back to a normal level and how a shock wave for energy-intensive companies can be prevented. The result was the electricity and gas price brakes. What is not so good, however, is that the law is now formulated in such a way that it does not reach many companies. The law should be amended before the ink is dry.
What adjustments would you want to make to the leveling process?
I would change the construction of affiliated companies in the law. The burden should be taken off who gets the gas bill. However, in the current version of the law, it is not the end consumer who would benefit, but so-called affiliated companies. However, this is a fictitious construct. The bill is paid by whoever has the connection. The law is otherwise correct, but is not as effective as we would have liked.
Your company is turning to metal recycling. What is your circular business model?
It's about recycling raw materials. A circular economy is the complete avoidance of waste. The product consists of materials, or rather recyclable materials. It is the manufacturer's task to produce the products in such a way that they can be reintroduced into the cycle. And in such a way that the material can be turned back into a product of the same quality. We have therefore given our customers the opportunity to bring any steel with a zinc coating to us. We then take care of recycling it by type. Zinc should then be reused by us in the same way as primary zinc. Metals are ideally suited to a circular economy. We have processes for this that we will scale up in the coming years in collaboration with partners. We want to establish a business model like this under the Rezinq brand. One example: We have a customer from the traffic engineering sector who dismantles crash barriers that are no longer used. We give the product a new surface and then this product is used in a distribution center for parcel service providers.
You also want to restructure your processes and products ...
Yes, this has an energy and a material component. We want to switch from natural gas to green hydrogen. In Gelsenkirchen, together with other companies willing to make the switch, we have therefore launched the so-called climate port, where we want to try to convert the processes. The other component is Rezinq, which I have already described. This is also related to the planned circular product passports. With these passports, companies in Europe will in future be required to record a product-relatedCO2 and environmental footprint. This will show how sustainable and circular the products are.
What impact will this have on our dependence on raw materials?
Establishing secondary cycles is a beneficial process, even if it is painful at first. We are a country with few raw materials, but we have the raw materials here and just have to make sure that we can use them in Germany and Europe. Metallic coatings will gain market share through a circular economy because their recyclability means that they incur lower costs over their entire life cycle.
INFO
Lars Baumgürtel represents the batch galvanizing sector as a board member of the ZVO industry association. In addition to managing ZINQ, he is also Vice President of the North Westphalia Chamber of Industry and Commerce and an expert in parliamentary committees onCO2 pricing and hydrogen. His medium-sized Gelsenkirchen-based company focuses on the hot-dip galvanizing of steel and employs around 1,700 people at 45 locations in five countries.
