Three of the U.S.’s seven integrated steel mills — mills that make iron ore and steel — sit within 20 miles of each other in northwest Indiana. Over the past decades, black smoke from the mills has clouded them and those who live in the vicinity.
To the steelworkers who came to the region, the pollution and its adverse health impacts were a necessary sacrifice for the stability and benefits of a well-paying union job.
But some in the region say that shouldn’t be the case.
“My vision for the steel industry and the Rust Belt is for our communities to continue to have these facilities, but for us to look outside and not see all the black smoke,” Lisa Vallee, a resident of northwest Indiana, said.
While the heavy, integrated steel mills drew many to the region in the early to mid-20th century, in recent years, automation has led to a wave of unemployment. The three mills in Northwest Indiana, U.S. Steel’s Gary Works and Cleveland-Cliffs’ Indiana Harbor and Burns Harbor lost over 6,000 jobs since 2024 alone, according to a report from Indiana University.
These steel mills are among the state’s top emitters of carbon monoxide, sulfur dioxide and other air toxins. According to the IU report, northwest Indiana’s steel mills contribute to hundreds of thousands of asthma cases and $75 million in annual health care costs.
“When we talk to community members, they know someone who works in the steel mill, and they also know someone who has cancer,” said Hilary Lewis, steel director at the national nonprofit Industrious Labs. “And I think there’s a general understanding that those two things go hand in hand.”
The integrated steel mills still rely on the blast furnace, which produces steel by melting iron ore. The heat required is generated by coke, a coal-based, carbon-intensive fuel that also creates the black smoke and carbon emissions.
The blast furnaces also cannot react easily to changes in steel demand, which makes these mills less competitive, said Justine Hackimer, industrial decarbonization program manager at the think tank Ohio River Valley Institute.
“It’s all or nothing with a blast furnace, so that’s a bit of a disadvantage,” she said.
Vallee, in her work as the organizing director of local advocacy group Just Transition Northwest Indiana, is spearheading a push for the mills to transition to a cleaner alternative, direct-reduced iron (DRI) furnaces.
Rather than melting the iron ore, DRI furnaces can extract iron at much lower temperatures and therefore can run using gas, reducing carbon emissions by around 50% compared to the blast furnace, according to the IU report.
The DRI furnace can also utilize fuels other than natural gas, including green hydrogen, a clean fuel made from renewable energy such as wind or solar. Clean fuel is expensive and energy-intensive to make, but it can reduce emissions to nearly zero.
This transition is already happening – even in the Rust Belt.
Cleveland-Cliffs, one of the country’s largest steel manufacturers based in Ohio, opened a DRI plant in Toledo, Ohio, in 2020.
“We’re the Rust Belt, we’re the steel region,” Vallee said. “So we want to keep it where it was founded.”
Vallee is asking a Japanese company, Nippon Steel, to do just that.
In 2025, Nippon acquired U.S. Steel. President Donald Trump permitted the acquisition, provided that Nippon agreed to a “golden plan”L to invest $11 billion in American steel infrastructure by 2028.
Vallee is seizing the opportunity — $350 million has been allocated to refurbish Gary Works, money she believes can be used to transition facilities to DRI.
“Our big ask right now is for Nippon to meet with us and have a conversation,” Vallee said.
So far, the company hasn’t met Vallee’s demands. Instead, Nippon plans to use the funds to reline one of the blast furnaces. This extends the use of the blast furnace by 15 to 20 years, which U.S. Steel says will prevent the furnace from closing down.
Lewis, Industrious Labs’ steel director, said that investing in DRI ensures more longevity for the steel mills than relining.
“That’s a much longer term, like a 50- to longer-year investment,” Lewis said. “And that’s more job security and economic stability and a greater commitment to that community.”
Nippon is investing in DRI technology — just not in the Rust Belt. The company is spending $1.9 billion to build a DRI furnace in Arkansas, at Big River Steel. Lewis said the difference in the amount invested in Gary compared to Big River is an indicator of where the steel industry is headed.
“Direct-reduced iron is on the up. It is growing, but the total amount of demand in the U.S. is not,” Lewis said. “That points to one thing, which is that as these new facilities come online, they’re going to eat away at the customer base of aging, dirty, old facilities, and that’s another thing that will cause them to close.”
Terry Steagall, a retired Indiana Harbor steelworker, said that the global demand for sustainably produced steel is growing — and so should the steel industry in Indiana.
“We need to make sure we have a steel industry in the future, and that we can compete worldwide,” he said. “With the way we’re going, if we stay in the same mode we’re in, we’re not going to be able to do that.”
While most steel in the U.S. is made from recycled materials, the steel from blast furnaces is considered higher grade, which is fit for automobiles. Steagall said that it is possible for DRI to produce the same quality of steel as a blast furnace.
He added that while converting a blast furnace to DRI has never been done in the U.S. before, it is feasible.
In Middletown, Ohio, another steel town, a similar push for greener steel is taking place.
Donna Ballinger lives 800 feet away from Middletown Works, an integrated steel mill run by Cleveland-Cliffs in Middletown. She said she cannot touch anything — even on her property — without coming into contact with “black stuff” from the facility.
“You just mainly can’t go outside unless you’re going to your car and back,” she said.
According to a 2024 report from Industrious Labs, Middletown Works is among the top 10 polluters in the state for several health-damaging contaminants, as the mill also produces its own coke onsite.
In 2024, Cleveland-Cliffs received a $500 million grant from the federal government to replace its blast furnace with a DRI furnace. But since then, the mill has pivoted away from that original plan and is instead using the grant to refurbish its blast furnace so it can run for another few decades. It also plans to add a cogeneration plant that uses the furnace’s waste heat to generate electricity and steam for the facility.
Ballinger had urged Cleveland-Cliffs to reconsider their new plans for the grant. Her call got pushback from the mill and its workers, who said the transition may take away their jobs. As of August 2026, Cleveland-Cliffs and the Trump Administration have formalized their plans for upgrading the existing blast furnace.
“It’s not about taking their jobs or closing down the plant,” Ballinger said. “We just deserve clean air to breathe.”
While the Middletown decarbonization project is no longer happening, Steagall is hopeful that in the future, as DRI becomes more widely adopted, Cleveland-Cliffs will join the transition, too — especially at its Indiana Harbor and Burns Harbor facilities.
In July, Gary’s City Council passed a resolution urging U.S. Steel and Nippon Steel to modernize the Gary Works plant by transitioning to green steelmaking technologies.
Hackimer wants the green transition to happen for the U.S. Steel’s Mon Valley Works mill near Pittsburgh, too. A 2023 report she co-authored from ORVI found that transitioning to cleaner steel would increase total regional jobs supported by steelmaking by as much as 43% by 2031.
“I think for the communities where they’ve had this history of the steel industry, now that there is this technology available that can clean it up, they want to see that come to where they are,” she said. “They want to grow these jobs to be able to continue and to grow and to really be a part of the next generation of steelmaking.”
