LEED™ and Steel

Getting the LEED credits for recycled materials may be easier than you think. If your project uses steel framing, either structural steel or light gage metal framing, or concrete framing with steel reinforcing, all that steel represents recycled material. All you have to do is document the quantity, cost, and source. But let’s step back a bit. What’s this about steel? Well, all steel manufactured in the U.S. is made of a significant amount of steel scrap. Over 12,000 auto dismantlers and 1,800 scrap dealers in North America reclaim steel for reuse!

There are two basic manufacturing methods, the basic oxygen furnace (BOF) and the electric arc furnace (EAF). BOF uses approximately 25 to 35 percent old steel and produces mainly steel sheet for forming. EAF uses 95 to 100 percent old steel and produces mainly structural steel and other strength-oriented products. These figures are determined by surveys performed by various trade associations, the U.S. Geological Survey, and universities.

So, to determine the recycled content of any steel product, all you need to know is which technology is used to make the steel — BOF or EAF. That’s fortunate, because you are unlikely to get recycled content figures from the manufacturers of most products. The reason is that it is extremely difficult to track exactly which mill lot a particular steel item comes from. Mill certificates can be and have long been provided for structural steel. But for formed steel items, most final fabricators do not know more than which mill the primary sheet product came from. For example, a light gage steel framing manufacturer told us that they could provide a letter stating that they order all their steel sheet from a certain group of mills, all of which use the EAF process — but nothing more specific than that.

Now why do we suggest that the steel in your project might be enough to achieve the LEED recycled material credits? We did a cursory review of several of the model projects included in BSD CostLink®/AE, which includes R.S. Means costs. For a typical steel framed commercial building, adding up all the steel products, including hollow metal doors, railings, gratings, sheet metal roofing and siding, etc., amounted to over 35 percent of the total cost excluding the mechanical, electrical, and equipment. (The exclusion of M/E and equipment is how the credits are to be computed — you can either use a default percentage of the total construction cost or add them up individually.) Approximately 8 percent of the computed total cost was structural steel (typically EAF), with the remaining 27 percent formed steel (typically BOF). So, without actually getting any further information from the manufacturers we could compute 27 times 0.25 plus 8 percent equals 14.75 percent of the cost as post-consumer recycled content. That’s considerably more than the 5 and 10 percent post-consumer plus 1/2 post-industrial content required to get the two LEED credits. Obviously, each building project will vary, but recycled steel will go a long way toward achieving these credits on most commercial projects.

In order to do this computation, you need to obtain the total cost of all the steel products on the project, the total project cost less the M/E/equipment (or multiply by the default percentage), and, for greater precision, the mill process used for each product. Several new contract administration forms designed to aid in this process have been added to BSD SpecLink® this quarter. The first is 013516.01, LEED Material Cost Summary — to get the overall costs from the Contractor. The second is 013516.03, LEED Metal-Containing Product List — a checklist for the Contractor to indicate for which products he has submitted form 013516.04, LEED New Product Content Form. That last form has spaces for the manufacturer or supplier to indicate the percentage recycled content and the steel mill process, as well as wood content and rapidly renewable content, and for the Contractor to certify the cost of the product. These new forms are accompanied by Section 013516, LEED Submittal Forms, covering the procedures, and other forms intended to aid in achieving LEED credits for certified wood, local and regional products, rapidly renewable content, and reused products.

This is the first in a series of articles on the LEED Materials and Resources (MR) credits, which are among the credits that must be addressed via the specifications.