The tour starts at 8 a.m. on certain days and lasts around three and a half hours.
The tour starts in the visitor center with an informative 15-minute film. Raw materials, products, the history and working world of Salzgitter Flachstahl as well as entertaining explanations by a member of the visitor service team provide a clear introduction to various production areas of steel manufacturing.
Before the subsequent bus tour, the visitors are given helmets and headphones so that the group of around 30 people can understand all the information provided by the visitor service employee during the three-and-a-half-hour tour at the various stops. For safety reasons, participants must wear long pants, sturdy shoes and long-sleeved shirts.
Then it's off - past the power station, coking plant, rolling mills, factory halls and parking lots. The tour of the 6.5 square kilometer site gives an impressive impression of the size of Germany's second largest steel manufacturer.
The first stop is one of several blast furnaces. The tallest is over 50 meters high and is the equivalent of a 15-storey skyscraper. Visitors take off their jackets in view of the rising temperatures.
It is just as warm in the hall as it is in some places on the ground. The pig iron, which the employees at the blast furnace have just separated from the slag through the covered tapping channel, runs underneath.
Every two hours, a small opening is made through which the slag and pig iron flow. Around 14,000 tons of pig iron are produced in Salzgitter every day. The blast furnaces never stand still and have to be filled with coke and iron ore all year round.
The visitors stop. An audible signal heralds the next work step: a steel worker in a silver protective suit and with special face and head protection takes samples of the red-hot 1,450-degree mass. The visitors stand at a safe distance from other steelworkers and look over their shoulders.
The flowing pig iron, reminiscent of lava flows, can be seen through a window. Sparks fly. It is so bright that visitors should not look through the glass with their naked eyes, but hold small plastic goggles in front of their eyes, which they have been given at the visitor center. The participants experience impressive processes.
At the next stop, the "steelworks", tour participants experience how the pig iron is refreshed with oxygen in large converters using a lance in a blowing process - resulting in steel.
This oxidation process reduces the carbon content, while unwanted by-elements such as sulphur, phosphorus and carbon also burn off and are released into the flue gas or slag.
Before the steel is then cast into slabs in the continuous casting plant, different steel qualities can be achieved in the upstream alloying plant.
In the rolling mills, visitors experience how the slabs are rolled to specific dimensions in the subsequent production process and wound into steel sheet coils.
The coils, which can only be moved by cranes, are then transported to the delivery hall. Around 420 different types of steel are produced in Salzgitter, which are then exported all over the world. With this last look at the coils, the participants then return to the visitor center.
Anyone who would like to read up a little more can do so on the various display boards or computers, before returning home with a wealth of impressions.