Steel plants: project table, coordinates corrected with Global Energy Monitor; blast furnace plants sized by coking coal need (capacity × 0.78 t/t), other plants drawn as small diamonds. Coal:
GEM Global Coal Mine Tracker, April 2024 (CC BY 4.0), 3,706 operating mines that are either underground or surface (the 94 mines that combine both are not shown); mining method as recorded by GEM; rings show capacity where no output is reported. Reach is straight-line distance from the nearest steel plant. Crops: harvested area from
CROPGRIDS (circa 2020, 0.05° grid, summed to 0.5° cells), turned into tonnes using each country's FAOSTAT production (2023; chestnut 2024 for the top six producers, with the remaining world output spread over the other areas) divided by its CROPGRIDS area, so national totals match FAOSTAT. Local conflicts:
Environmental Justice Atlas (EJAtlas), accessed 4 October 2026; the 33 steel, iron and coke cases and 116 coal mining cases among about 4,600 mapped conflicts, selected by commodity, conflict type and case name. Coal power plant cases are left out. Each triangle links to its EJAtlas case page; size shows the intensity EJAtlas records. Pictures: conflict photos from the EJAtlas case pages; site views from Esri World Imagery (Esri, Maxar, Earthstar Geographics), about 3 km across for steel plants and 4 km for mines, centred on the GEM coordinates. Links go to each site's GEM Wiki page or EJAtlas case. Degraded land:
Trends.Earth SDG Indicator 15.3.1 datasets (Conservation International, version 1.2, CC BY 4.0), band "SDG 15.3.1 status in 2023 compared to the 2000–2015 baseline", which combines land productivity, land cover and soil organic carbon; read at about 2 km and summed to 0.5° cells, counting persistent, recent and baseline degradation as degraded. Acid soils:
ISRIC SoilGrids 2.0 (CC BY 4.0), pH in water averaged over 0–30 cm from the 5 km aggregated maps; a soil counts as acid below pH 5.5. People living on affected land:
GHS-POP 2025 (European Commission JRC, R2023A, CC BY 4.0), summed to 0.5° cells and multiplied by the affected share of each cell, which assumes people are spread evenly within a cell. Areas are given in hectares (1 km² = 100 ha). Slag landfill: unused steelmaking slag (converter, electric arc furnace and ladle slag, about 150 kg per tonne of steel at 73% utilisation) times each country's unused share: China 70.5%, Japan 1.6% and the US 15.6% (
Guo et al. 2018), EU 18% (
Euroslag 2024), and 20% elsewhere, matching worldsteel's 'over 80%' global recovery of steelmaking slag. Unused share by slag type: blast furnace slag is treated as fully used (EU 100% in 2024; worldsteel reports nearly 100% recovery of ironmaking slag); converter and electric arc furnace slag take the country shares above; ladle slag takes the country share or 70%, whichever is higher, because ladle slag is described as 'predominantly landfilled without being utilized' (
Recycling, 2025) and no national statistics exist for it; the 70% is our assumption. Stockpiles: more than 300 Mt in China by 2016 (Guo et al.), more than 15 Mt in Indian slag yards (
Down To Earth, from CPCB data). Slag type: each steel plant's circle is sized by its estimated slag of the chosen type a year (capacity × 73% utilisation × the rates above, applied only to the furnaces the plant has). The treatable area uses the chosen slag type. Other slag dumps are the sites mapped by name in
OpenStreetMap (© OpenStreetMap contributors, ODbL), queried on 4 October 2026: landfills and spoil heaps whose name or waste tag says slag in English, German, Russian, Ukrainian, Polish, Spanish, Italian, Turkish or Chinese, without ash ponds. Filled squares sit within 25 km of a steel plant in our list or name a steelworks; hollow squares are other slag dumps. Mapping is uneven: Russia, Ukraine and Germany are well covered, China and India hardly at all. Paddy methane and slag: field trials in Korea, China and Indonesia report lower methane from rice paddies amended with silicate or steel slag (
Ali et al. 2008;
Susilawati et al. 2015). Slag uses listed under each type are the main outlets, after the
worldsteel co-products fact sheet. Slag made in scope: plants inside the chosen region, at about 73% of capacity (2.4 Gt of global capacity with about 640 Mt idle in 2025,
OECD data via EUROFER); blast furnace slag about 270 kg per tonne of steel at blast furnace plants (300 kg per tonne of pig iron,
Nippon Steel, at about 0.9 t pig iron per tonne of steel), converter (BOF) or electric arc furnace (EAF) slag 125 kg per tonne (100–150 kg/t, same source), split by each plant's furnaces, and ladle slag 25 kg per tonne. Treatable area per year: each affected cell is assigned to its nearest steel plant; each plant can supply ladle furnace slag at 25 kg per tonne of steel capacity (midpoint of the 20–30 kg/t range in
the ladle slag literature), or all steelmaking slag at about 120 kg per tonne (converter and electric arc furnace slag typically run 100–150 kg/t; see the
worldsteel co-products fact sheet), at the same 73% utilisation, and the treatable area is the lesser of its slag divided by the chosen rate and the affected land assigned to it. Slag composition, existing uses of the slag and soil needs all vary, so read it as an order of magnitude. Addressable hectares are the affected hectares within the chosen distance of a steel plant. Crop emissions:
FAOSTAT emissions intensities (2023, farm-gate, kg CO₂e per kg, AR5), by country for rice and for cereals excluding rice (used for maize, wheat and barley), multiplied by each cell's estimated production; no intensity exists for chestnuts. Projected 2035 emissions scale each country's figure by the change in direct emissions for that crop between 2024 and 2035 in the
OECD-FAO Agricultural Outlook 2026-2035 (barley follows 'other coarse grains'; countries without their own series follow the world trend). People farming each crop are an estimate: the World Bank's agricultural employment (share of employment in agriculture × labour force × (1 − unemployment), latest year) is shared out by the crop's harvested area against the country's cropland (arable land plus permanent crops), using CROPGRIDS harvested areas; agriculture also includes livestock, forestry and fishing, so read it as an order of magnitude. Regions follow Natural Earth countries; figures for a region count only the land, mines and plants inside it, while distances run to the nearest steel plant anywhere. Land and country borders: Natural Earth (borders simplified to about 5 km).