Sustainability

Recycling and Recyclability

  • Steel is the most recycled material on the planet.
  • Steel products are 100 percent recyclable at the end of their useful lives.
  • Once produced, steel can be continually recycled into new steel products—a steel beam can become another steel beam, or a food can, refrigerator, or roof panel.
  • Most structural steel produced in North America contains 90 percent or more recycled steel.
  • Steel framing typically contains a minimum of 25 percent recycled steel and is continually recyclable.
  • All steel contains recycled content ranging up to 100 percent for some products.
  • Steel’s inherent durability and recyclability make it an ideal fit for the circular economy. Once produced, steel becomes a permanent resource that can be continuously recycled into new steel.
  • In the U.S. alone, there are typically 60 to 80 million tons of steel scrap recycled per year into new steel products.
  • In the past 30 years, more than one billion tons of steel scrap have been recycled into new steel by the American steel industry.
  • The U.S. recycles enough steel scrap to build 25 Eiffel Towers every day of the year, and annually recycles enough steel scrap to build more than 650 Golden Gate Bridges.
  • With today’s sorting and separating technology, millions of tons of iron and steel are diverted from landfills to recycling and beneficial reuse.
  • Nearly 100 percent of the steel industry’s co-products can be used beneficially in other applications. Slag is used in cement, road construction, fertilizers, and hydraulic engineering. Process gases are used to produce heat and/or electricity. Metal oxides, such as iron oxides, nickel and zinc, can be recovered from steelmaking dust.
  • Using steel on a construction site minimizes the amount of demolition waste since steel can be easily and responsibly recycled.
  • When steel construction products have outlived their current intended use, they can be recycled into new steel products.

Green Building Rating Systems and EPDs

Steel can be used to comply with the requirements of sustainable design standards such as:

  • International Green Construction Code (IgCC)
  • ASHRAE Standard 189.1, Standard for the Design of High-Performance Green Buildings Except Low-Rise Residential Buildings
  • National Green Building Standard (ICC-700).

Steel can also provide credit points for green building rating systems like:

Environmental Product Declarations, or EPDs, are documents that summarize the results of a life cycle assessment (LCA) for specific products. They describe the potential environmental impacts of a product across a specified list of environmental impact categories. Click here to download the EPDs for several steel construction products.

Steel vs. Wood

  • Claims made about the “environmental benefits” of using mass timber for mid- and high-rise building construction often rely on existing assumptions to reinforce them versus scientific studies.
  • Wood is typically a single-use material. At the end of its useful life, the demolished structure of a wood building is typically landfilled or incinerated. This returns any stored carbon dioxide back into the atmosphere as either carbon dioxide or methane.
  • Wood is a renewable building resource, but being renewable is not the same thing as being sustainable. Renewability is a single attribute, just like recyclability is a single attribute. Wood can no more be classified as a sustainable material based on a single attribute than can steel or any other building material.
  • The wood industry claims that for every tree cut down, one or more new trees are planted. However, the claim does not take into account that it will take many years before those saplings mature. In the meantime, the forest is depleted of the oxygen, water storage and filtration, wildlife habitat, global cooling, and other benefits wood provided by the mature tree. (From “Understanding Environmental Product Declarations [EPDs] for Wood [Current Problems and Future Possibilities”], The Sierra Club Forest Certification and Green Building Team, September 24, 2013.)
  • Trees are often harvested by clear-cutting, leaving large gaps in the forestland that impact the plants and animal species that are left behind.
  • Carbon is sequestered in the fiber of trees, but that does not mean that wood buildings become large reservoirs of carbon that is stored indefinitely. The reality is that carbon storage in wood products is temporary and is released back into the atmosphere by the demolition and subsequent decay of the wood structure or by fire.
  • The carbon that is sequestered in new wood construction is only offsetting the impacts of the release of greenhouse gases from wood buildings currently being demolished. Wood construction is not a new technology that will suddenly result in a quantum increase in carbon storage.
  • Eighty-one percent of forests in the United States are not certified, 11 percent are Sustainable Forestry Initiative (SFI®)-certified, and 7 percent are Forest Stewardship Council (FSC®)-certified. (From “Forest Certification Around the World: Georgia-Pacific, Sustainable Forestry and Certification,” Georgia-Pacific, 2014). The sustainable harvest certification provided by the Sustainable Forestry Initiative has often been challenged as to whether it reaches the required threshold of sustainable forestry. SFI was created in 1994 by the paper and timber industry.
  • In actuality, only 7 percent of the forestland in the United States reaches the threshold of being considered sustainably managed.