This guidance is primarily aimed at public procurers involved in a range of contracting agreements related to building materials and products. This includes the purchase of building materials for construction works, but may also extend to material extraction, manufacturing, building, retrofit, refurbishment, design, interior fit out, and end-of-life demolition or deconstruction processes. 

Channel Projects, an architecture studio, sought to develop a solution that would encourage steel reuse in the construction industry, in order to tackle the material’s significant contribution to global carbon emissions.

With support from ReLondon’s business transformation team and the Mayor of London’s Green New Deal fund, Channel Projects was able to further develop its “ReFrame” industrial building concept and business model.

The UK Government’s recent climate change legislation and the ambitious carbon targets from funders and end users, are encouraging developers and their design teams to look at exactly where carbon is contained within construction projects and where it can be reduced.  

Thanks to funding from Innovate UK, in collaboration with the NICER programme, a new ‘toolkit’ has been developed as part of the ASBP-led ‘Delivering Innovative Steel ReUse ProjecT‘ (DISRUPT).

Steel is essential for decarbonizing our energy system. We use it to build solar panels, wind turbines, and transmission towers. At the same time, the global iron and steel industry is currently responsible for 11% of global carbon dioxide emissions and 7–9% of global greenhouse gas emissions. In addition to energy projects, we use steel for buildings, bridges, medical devices, and other important applications. As economies develop and build up infrastructure, global demand for steel will continue increasing.

From the Global Energy Monitor, The Global Steel Plant Tracker (GSPT) provides information on global crude iron and steel production plants, and includes every plant currently operating with a capacity of five hundred thousand tonnes per year (ttpa) or more of crude iron or steel. The GSPT also includes all plants meeting the five hundred ttpa threshold that have been proposed since 2017 or retired or mothballed since 2020.

SteelZero is a global initiative that brings together leading organisations to speed up the transition to a net zero steel industry.

Steel is the world’s most widely used material – but despite technologies existing for production to be decarbonised, steelmaking is currently one of the biggest emitters of CO₂ globally. 

The Transition Pathway Initiative Global Climate Transition Centre (TPI Centre) is an independent, authoritative source of research and data into the progress being made by the financial and corporate world in making the transition to a low-carbon economy.

The Inventory of Carbon and Energy (also know as the ICE database) is an embodied carbon database for building materials which is available for free on this page. It contains data for over 200 materials, broken down into over 30 main material categories. The first version was released in 2005 and it has been updated at periodic intervals. 

The Construction Material Pyramid from CINARK at the Royal Danish Academy makes it possible to compare, for example, CO2 footprints between different categories of materials or between material types within the same category. It also makes it possible to view different kinds of environmental impacts across the different materials. It thus offers a tangible, interactive calculation tool and at the same time opens up a dialogue about more detailed studies of the materials’ position in the pyramid and later their place in the project design.