Ecological Benefits of Steel Buildings for Storage

Here’s a pop quiz question: which are more ecologically friendly: wooden barns or steel buildings? You might be surprised to learn that steel buildings are actually far more earth-friendly than most wooden structures. In fact, there are a number of reasons that a metal building is much kinder to the earth than a similarly sized plastic or wooden building.

Earth-Friendly Materials

Nearly all the metal used in steel buildings today is post-consumer recycled steel. That means it’s already been used and your new building doesn’t require any more materials taken from the earth. By contrast, the typical wooden building requires dozens of trees to  be cut down and plastic buildings use chemicals and minerals taken from the earth.

Recyclable Materials

At the other end of the life cycle of steel buildings, nearly all the materials used to erect a metal building are recyclable themselves. When a steel building is torn down, the detritus takes up less than 10 percent of the landfill room that a similarly sized wooden building would take up. Even better, in many cases, the metal building can be deconstructed and put back together on another property, which leaves behind no detritus at all.

Smaller Carbon Footprint

Steel building components are generally fabricated at one factory and delivered to the work site in one shipment, considerably reducing the amount of carbon used in transporting them. By contrast, the materials for a wooden storage building come from many different factories and are each transported separately to the stores and warehouses where you buy them. You can reduce the carbon footprint even further by ordering your metal building from a fabricator that is located close to your building site.

Energy Efficient Construction Methods

Erecting a steel building is considerably less complicated than building any other type of structure. That means you spend less time, less energy and less equipment putting them up. You need fewer people to put them up and less fuel to run the machinery needed to erect a steel building

Energy Efficient Structures

Finally, precision engineering allows steel buildings to be incredibly energy efficient. Unlike wood, which expands and contracts depending on the weather and allows drafts and heat transfer through the seams and cracks in the walls, steel buildings fit together tightly and are airtight and weather-tight. That means that your heating and cooling budget goes a lot further – and you use a lot less energy to heat and cool your steel building.

If you’re considering a storage building and are concerned about the planet, consider the ecological advantages of choosing steel buildings above other types of structures. You’ll be kinder to the environment and reap many other benefits of building with steel as well.