When your thoughts turn to eco-friendly building materials, you might first think of bamboo, cork, adobe, reclaimed wood and mass timber, or even hempcrete or papercrete. The stereotypical vision of an eco-friendly future that might pop into your head is built largely out of plant matter. Plants are, after all, natural materials, and natural materials tend to be very eco-friendly.
But metals are also natural materials, and it’s all too easy to overlook the essential role they can play in our collective efforts to build a sustainable world. Is steel a sustainable material? If you’re asking this question for the first time, your gut answer might be no—but the truth is a surprising yes.
And there are more reasons to praise steel and stainless steel for their sustainability than simply to leave behind a healthier environment for future generations—there are near-term cost savings you can reap now by recycling and using recycled steel, for example, in your construction and fabrication projects.
If there’s one thing we here at American Stainless know, it’s steel. In this article, we’ll take a look at how using steel to build eco-friendly industrial pipes just makes good economic sense.
How is steel sustainable?
Steel is a nonrenewable resource. Unlike trees and plants, metal ores do not grow back. Many people confuse “nonrenewable resource” with “non-sustainable material”—however, this isn’t necessarily true.
Metals are infinitely recyclable. This is in stark contrast to a lot of other materials that we tend to think of as “recyclable.” Paper, for example, which people generally think of as being very recyclable, can only be recycled five to seven times on average before the pulp fibers degrade to the point of unusability. The less said about plastic, the better. Glass is the only substance that, like metal, can be recycled an infinite amount of times without degrading.
Metals like steel don’t degrade at all when they’re recycled. The recycling process does not affect their physical characteristics. Recycled stainless steel is just as strong as new stainless steel, just as resistant to corrosion from harsh chemicals or environmental conditions, and just as long-lived and durable under high temperatures and pressures.
In fact, if you’ve been using steel products at all in your projects, you’ve likely already been taking advantage of steel and stainless steel’s sustainability without realizing it. Steel is one of the most recycled materials in the world; over the past 125 years, over 25 billion tons of steel have been recycled, according to statistics gathered by the World Steel Association. Today, structural steel contains an average of 92% recycled content!
How Sustainable Steel Saves You Money
So, what are the economic impacts of using recycled steel and recycling scrap stainless steel in your construction and fabrication projects? Let’s find out:
Cost Savings
Recycled steel is almost always significantly cheaper than virgin (non-recycled) steel. Virgin steel requires significant energy and labor investments to create, since new iron ore has to be mined, processed, and used to create steel. Recycling makes steel products cheaper, less labor-intensive, and more energy-efficient to produce—all recycled steel needs is old steel to process.
With the knowledge that recycled steel is just as strong, just as durable, and just as effective in industrial environments, you can rest assured that when you buy sustainable steel products, you are receiving the same high-quality parts as if you were buying virgin steel. The lower production costs of recycled steel materials can also mean lower price tags for you.
Market Competitiveness
Many of your commercial and industrial clients have a vested interest in meeting their own sustainability goals, and using recycled steel can make you a valuable partner in achieving those goals. Take, for example, LEED sustainability credits. To be eligible for certain credits, buildings are required to use a certain minimum percentage of post-consumer recycled materials.
For example, LEED Credit 4.1 requires a minimum of 25% of building materials that contain a minimum of 20% post-consumer recycled content or a minimum of 40% post-industrial recycled material.
When your projects incorporate sustainable steel, you make your work more marketable and can more easily attract sustainability-minded customers.
What’s the difference between post-consumer and post-industrial recycled steel?
When looking at requirements for sustainable projects or the documentation for sustainable materials, you’ve likely seen the terms “post-consumer” and “post-industrial” before. What do these terms mean?
- Post-consumer recycled materials are recycled from products that have been used by consumers. For example, if a steel manufacturer recycles a broken steel valve into other steel products, the steel reclaimed from it becomes post-consumer recycled steel.
- Post-industrial recycled materials are recycled from manufacturing waste or byproducts. For example, if a manufacturer takes a fabricator’s steel scrap and recycles it into a steel valve, that valve is made from post-industrial recycled steel.
Smoother Supply Chains
Recycled stainless steel and steel products can be cheaper than products made from virgin steel—and that’s not all the benefits on cost you can reap from them. In one of our previous blogs on nickel pricing, we discussed how rising raw material prices for nickel can cause the price of stainless steel pipe to rise accordingly. This is because nickel comprises up to 10% or more of stainless steel, and as it becomes more expensive to procure virgin nickel, it becomes more expensive to produce virgin stainless steel.
You can likely see where this is going already—because recycled stainless steel already has the nickel it needs in it, it is less affected by the fluctuating prices of raw nickel. As a result, procuring recycled steel can make your procurement processes more predictable and easier on the budget.
Sustainability and Profitability Go Hand-In-Hand
In the twenty-first century, it’s not a choice between building sustainably and making money—you can have both. Steel and stainless steel’s sustainability bona fides can be a powerful tool in your toolbox for reducing procurement costs, standing out in the construction and fabrication market, and insulating your projects from supply chain issues.
As the US Southeast’s top supplier of steel and stainless steel PVF products, American Stainless is here to help you build the eco-friendly industrial pipes your customers demand. Reach out to us today and get a price quote on recycled steel from the world’s best manufacturers.