David Taylor meets Matteo Attanasio, Head of Sustainability and Engineer at Symmetrys to talk about the launch of FerrousWheel, a new tool aimed at making reusing reclaimed steel easier – and thereby boosting the circular economy.

David Taylor  

Hi Matteo - how are you? 

 

I'm good, thank you. How are you?

 

I’m very good, thanks. I wanted to talk to you about your FerrousWheel – which is a brilliant name, by the way – which is essentially a steel reuse tool that you've just won funding for. Could you just elaborate on that a bit? And about how this came about, please?

 

Yes. We started researching steel reuse in December 2021, I believe, after we had a request from a client. They were keen to look at ways that they could reduce the embodied carbon in their structure, and steel reuse popped up as an option. Now, when we first started researching it, we didn't really know if it was do-able. There's some guidance that has been released by the Steel Construction Institute and we referred to that, and we realized that, after a period of time and a bit of research, that it is actually feasible. Now, the project FerrousWheel, which I agree is a fantastic name not thought up, by me, unfortunately... 

 

(laughs)

 

...but by our colleagues at London Southbank University to a colleague of mine, here at Symmetrys. We had a connection with them, and they put us forward for an Accelerated Knowledge Transfer – or AKT – funding. The idea is relatively simple. It's an automated tool that links with Revit that basically allows you to access steel stockists, reclaimed steel stock and swap out the steel that you have in your Revit model for the equivalent reclaimed steel section. Now, the idea is basically to make the process of suggesting steel reuse as an idea to your clients a lot quicker for the designer.

 

And where are we in terms of developing this tool? Is it all ready to go now? Is it live? Or do you need to do lots of work on refining it?

 

No. So luckily, with an Accelerated Knowledge Transfer, it's only a four-month research period. It's an incredibly short period of time to turn something around. But we've been fortunate enough to have some fantastic people at London South Bank University working on this, almost booked out for the last four months. We're about two weeks away now from releasing a tool. And I think, if you ask around in the market at the moment, there are a few companies developing very similar tools. But where we hope that our tool stands out is that it's going to be completely open-source. We're not developing it to sell on. As part of our signing up to the Engineers Declare to the Institution of Structural Engineers, we want to share, as much as possible, any research any knowledge that we have, that could help others to reduce the embodied carbon in their design. That actually works both ways. When we release the tool in two weeks, what we're going to be saying is: “please pick it apart!”. You know, comment on it, have a look through it and give us ideas of how we can improve it. The AKT funding effectively finishes – the research period – in two weeks. But through conversations with LSBU, we know that we're going to be working on this tool for most of the rest of the year. And we hope that this release in a few weeks' time is going to generate a good amount of feedback that we can then feed into this tool in the future, refine it and hopefully making something useful for people across the industry.

 

You mentioned it's open source. Is that an issue, then, that other organizations are seeking to do similar things, but are keeping it as sort of commercial entity?

 

It's a good question. I can understand the position of some large companies who...ultimately it provides a competitive advantage. And I completely understand that. But I think there's so much benefit to be had from releasing things with this. Obviously, the sharing of knowledge is absolutely critical. You know, the IPCC have only just released their report, which is basically a final warning. And we need to move quickly. So, releasing the information is obviously beneficial from that point of view. But it's also reciprocal. We will get knowledge from others in the industry to help refine and improve the tool, and hopefully make it better for everyone. So, whilst I understand there's money to be made from these tools, I think the more sharing the better.

 

You have used reclaimed steel in the past. Is it a difficult process to do that?

 

From a design point of view, thanks to work done by the Steel Construction Institute and others, the actual engineering design of the steel is relatively similar to how we would design for a new piece of steel. So, from that perspective, from our perspective, it's not too tricky. I think what becomes difficult is the procurement of the steel. So, ensuring that you have enough in stock. We recycle 96% to 98% of all steel, but 60% of the steel that we're using is actually a virgin steel. So, the demand is outstripping the supply in terms of recycled steel. Now, when you take that over to reclaimed steel, it's even more difficult – the market is even more tight in terms of how much stock there is. So, I think the difficulty at the moment is ensuring that we have enough reclaimed steel to go round, which is a great problem to have. You know, we're in a position where it's really picking up in terms of its popularity, and we just need more awareness, I guess, in the industry. So, when the client has a steel building in central London or anywhere else that needs to come down, for whatever reason, that steel is prioritized for deconstruction into demolition, and any sections that are not able to be repurposed and reclaimed, then they can go on to be recycled, as we're currently doing. But really, it should be reclamation as a priority.

 

So, final question, because we're just running up to time; what's been the most difficult challenge in developing this tool thus far? 

 

That's a good question. There have been a few challenges in terms of making it applicable to all stock. So, I guess the key challenge is that we're currently working with a single stock list, but there are many steel stockists who have different annotations with their steels, different ways of marking it up, different ways of logging it. And so, you've got multiple steel stockists with different formats for recording the steel that they've got on site, or that they've got in their stockyards. And our tool needs to be able to handle all of that different information. And that's probably the most difficult challenge. And it sort of leads us on to how do we create a uniform and regular stock list that any tool could tap into? And it almost requires a centralized database of reclaimed steel stock. That's the dream. We're not quite there yet, and we probably don't have enough stock to justify that at this point in time. But I'm hoping that, as more and more people become involved in reclaiming steel and reusing steel, that a tool or a central database of that nature will be very useful for everybody.

 

Well, congratulations. It sounds very laudable work. And I look forward to it being released in two weeks’ time you say, with a fanfare and fireworks?

 

(laughs) Yeah, definitely! We're very excited.

 

Brilliant. Thanks for your time. 

 

Thank you very much, David. Great to speak to you.