Major environmental problems related to refractories are discussed based on their historical studies mostly in Japan. Those issues have been experienced in a wide range of industrial scenes, from processing raw materials, making refractories to relining furnaces, handling after-use refractories.The key substances dealt with in this paper include, for example, suspended particulate, SOx and other exhaust gaseous emissions, hexa-valent chromium, and dioxin. The measures so far taken to avoid or reduce their influences upon environments are described with some future problems to be tackled.