Five Reasons to Love Green Steel Buildings

If you haven’t already got enough reasons to love steel buildings, here are five reasons that steel buildings are a green choice for an eco-conscious world.

Steel is Recycled and Recyclable

Steel is one of the greenest building materials available. While it is not a renewable resource, most of the steel used in construction today is recycled from other steel. That means that when you choose steel buildings for garages, storage sheds and other uses, you are helping the environment in two ways. Your building is made with steel that is kept out of the waste stream, reducing the garbage that clogs our landfills. In addition, when you choose steel as your primary building material, you are not using another non-renewable resource, and you’re not cutting down trees that are of vital importance to our global ecosystem.

Steel Buildings Arrive in One Shipment

All the components you need for your steel building are delivered at once, usually in one shipment and on one truck. When you build a structure of the same size with other materials, each material or component must be shipped separately. Even the wood you use often arrives in multiple shipments – posts on one truck from one destination, dimensional lumber on another from a second destination, fasteners from yet a third destination on a third truck. Each of those items adds to the carbon footprint of your structure.

Steel Buildings Are More Energy Efficient

Because metal buildings are precision-engineered to fit together perfectly, they’re easier to insulate for your region. In addition, most steel buildings are fitted with energy-efficient roofs – roofs that reflect the heat of the sun to prevent overheating in warm regions or absorb the sun’s rays to help with heating in colder regions.

Steel Buildings Require Little Maintenance

There’s more to low-maintenance than most people realize. Because metal buildings don’t need to be scraped, repainted, scraped down or treated with chemicals to kill termites and other wood-eating pests, you’ll be putting fewer toxins into the environment over the life of your building.

Steel Buildings Can Be Deconstructed Instead of Demolished

When a wood building is demolished, the waste material takes up nearly 100 cubic feet of space in a landfill. That’s not counting all the dust and chemical toxins that demolition spews into the air. By contrast, a steel building can be deconstructed – taken apart piece by piece and broken down into its component parts. It can be reassembled on another site or sent to a recycling plant to start life over again as a car, the side of a bus or another metal building.

If you’re considering a storage shed, garage or other structure on your property, take a look at the many reasons that steel buildings are good for the ecosystem.