Sustainable Steel Construction (SSC)

Steel is a material used to build the foundations of society. It is an iron-based material containing low amounts of carbon and alloying elements that can be made into thousands of compositions with exacting properties to meet a wide range of needs.

Steel is an essential material for society and an essential material for sustainable development for people to satisfy their needs and aspirations. The steels used for construction have been evolving ever since their initial development in the late 1800s. A steady series of improvements that both enhance and reduce the cost of construction with steel has been achieved. No one area of the world or country is leading this development. It spans from both mature and growing economies throughout the world - steel is a major construction material.

Steel's distinctive environmental fingerprint has many advantages. More than half of the steel we see around us has already been recycled from scrap. This valuable material from old buildings, bridges etc. is a powerful energy and resource saver. It takes at least 60% less energy to produce steel from scrap than it does from iron ore. Waste disposal problems are lessened because used steel can be recycled over and over.

Also, steel has been increasingly reused in construction worldwide. After a building's end of life, all steel components can be reused either in situ or deconstructed, transported, and reused at a different site. Steel reuse completely eliminates the energy and resource use and environmental emissions associated with iron ore extraction and processing and production for new steel.

Furthermore, steel, by nature, is open, thin, light, and strong. These characteristics are essential for achieving open space, material efficiency, constructability, and adaptability in a building:

1. An open interior environment allows the use of natural light and ventilation to reduce operational energy use in artificial lighting and heating, ventilation, and air conditioning (HVAC) systems in the building.
2. Material efficiency reduces material use and associated environmental impacts.
3. Constructability is an important factor in reducing energy use (during construction), timeframe, and costs.
4. An adaptable building incorporates, at the design and construction stage, the ability to make future changes easily and with minimum expense to meet the evolving needs of occupants. It means designing a building to allow its hierarchical layers to change, each in its own timescale. Incorporating adaptability into a building during initial construction saves time, money, and inconvenience when changes are needed or desired later in the life of the building.

This Sustainable Steel Construction or SSC site aims to facilitate the provision of aid information to industry and promote greater reuse and recycling of salvaged steel in construction and the innovative use of new steel towards achieving sustainability.