"Indonesia's climate villain POSCO... Dust blankets villages as residents fall ill", 3 August 2026

Krakatau Posco, located in the industrial city of Cilegon, home to steel mills and petrochemical facilities, is a joint venture established by POSCO and Indonesia's state-owned steelmaker Krakatau Steel. (…) Management control is exercised by POSCO. (…) There are claims that its steel production is having an adverse impact on local air pollution and greenhouse gas emissions.

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These groups pointed to problems in POSCO's operation of Krakatau Posco, including: severe air pollution and dust emissions causing negative environmental impacts on the local community; a failure to properly control this dust and smoke, causing serious harm to residents' health; and the exclusion of its overseas operations from its carbon-neutrality plan.

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Adding to these concerns, POSCO is planning to expand Krakatau Posco with a second blast furnace.

In response, a POSCO official said, "We are taking local residents' concerns seriously and are strengthening our operational management to reduce dust to a stricter degree, including expanding the use of water-spraying and cleaning vehicles both inside and outside the worksite," adding, "We plan to continue applying the dust-suppression technologies used at POSCO and to communicate transparently with local residents and other members of the community." Regarding the criticism that overseas worksites were excluded from its 2050 carbon-neutrality plan, the official said, "The decarbonisation roadmap applies the same direction to overseas subsidiaries as to domestic worksites, but next-generation core technologies such as hydrogen reduction ironmaking require large-scale infrastructure and national-level demonstration beforehand, so we are currently at the stage of securing technology demonstration and commercialisation capabilities domestically first," adding, "We are also working to achieve optimal environmental management at overseas worksites, taking local conditions into account."