Each year in the UK we demolish 50,000 buildings and from each of them there is a wealth of material that we should be able to reuse but… don’t. Reuse is one of the key principles of the circular economy and has advantages over recycling because the energy required to reuse something in its current form is so much less than the energy required to break it down, process it and then reform it into something useable.

Take steel, for example. Steel is manufactured in standard section sizes and standard grades that have changed very little over the last 50 years. So it would make sense that if you’re demolishing a building you should be able to remove steel sections with the intention of reusing them elsewhere. And yet we don’t. Recycle it? Yes, we do that a lot. But reuse? Not so much.

So what’s stopping us? Well, the Steel Construction Institute (SCI) and Cambridge University researched the barriers to steel reuse and found that a combination of issues makes the process much more difficult than it needs to be.

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