Sustainable Steel & Sheds

Adaptable , Reusable, Recyclable Steel

Steel Sheds can be designed to be ‘future proof’ with a little thought and pre-planning therefore increasing their sustainability.Steel buildings offer many advantages over other materials being modified easily and more cheaply than other buildings due to its lightweight, high strength characteristics and simplicity in cutting.

New openings, modifications and additions are usually simple. Any materials cut out of a steel shed can be recycled or re-used.

Steel Sheds also offer unique advantages when designing new buildings for use and reuse over time for different applications or even shifted to new locations.

  • Your shed might begin its life as temporary accommodation and storage whilst you build your Eco Home.
  • Then it may become your garage and workshop.
  • You may then modify it as a teenagers retreat as your kids grow up
  • or perhaps with some extention it could do the above and house the farming equipment you use for heading towards a self sufficient lifestyle.

For Civil or Commercial project applications Steel Sheds can simply be pulled down and relocated to a new location at the end of the project and re-erected for the next project.

Manufacturing Steel sheds

Cold rolling and punching steel Z section

Steel shed kit pre-fabrication is accomplished offsite, often from computerised design and is highly efficient.
Steel sheds lend themselves to automation and therefore to cost and resource efficiency.
Computer Numerical Control (CNC) machines driven by ‘Rtml’ files from the Building Information Modelling
(BIM) model is an efficient manufacturing process that reduces waste.

Embodied energy

Embodied energy is the energy consumed by all of the processes associated with the production of a building. This includes not just direct energy inputs during construction, but also all energy inputs needed to produce components, materials and services from the mining of natural resources to delivery of the Kit to your site.

Embodied energy content of Steel Sheds can be balanced off or reduced

  • if good design provides for lower energy consumption for its internal space.
  • if the building is designed for a long life (many varied uses)
  • the energy is recredited for components being reused in new buildings after demolition or,
  • the energy is recredited for extending a building’s life (future proofing or modification) or,
  • when the steel in your shed is recycled when its no longer required.

So make sure your shed is as future proof as you can forecast and is a durable and adaptable building since a sheds embodied energy needs to be assessed over the entire life cycle of the building.

The single most important factor in reducing the impact of embodied energy is to design your shed for a long-life.

Recycle

Recycling

The IISI’s “World Steel in Figures” reported that in 2007 the world steel industry consumed 482 million tonnes
of scrap to make 1.342 billion tonnes of steel, meaningthat 36 percent of world steel production is from
recycled material. Unlike many other materials, steel can be recycled again and again with reprocessing techniques maintaining
its properties and qualities.

Page Source credit : Australian Steel Institute