In conversations about structural materials, steel has been upstaged in recent years by wood and concrete. Wood is celebrated due to biomass's carbon sequestration potential and renewability, and strategies to reduce concrete’s significant carbon footprint have also received much attention.
Steel, one might presume, has remained essentially unchanged: a material cornerstone of modern architecture, robust and imminently capable, yet limited by its high embodied energy and global market volatility.
But just when we think we know an industry, it changes. While other structural materials have occupied center stage, steel has been undergoing a quiet renaissance, exhibiting measurable advances in environmental, economic, and technological performance.
At the 2025 NASCC Steel Conference in Louisville, this metamorphosis was tangible—not in the form of eye-popping spans or unexpected new alloys, but in subtler yet profound systemic changes altering how steel is harvested, processed, and fabricated in the United States.
The industry’s development of a robust national recycling infrastructure is a significant achievement. Impressively, 98% of structural steel from construction and demolition sources is now recycled. In addition,
71% of reinforcing steel (including rebar) is also recycled—a notable accomplishment given the challenges of extracting this material from reinforced concrete. Steel-based consumer appliances and product packaging also have high recycling rates in the U.S.
Steel’s impressive recycling gains are made possible by a highly developed circular economy that includes foundries, vehicle dismantlers, car shredders, and scrap collectors. A U.S. Geological Survey report states, “The recycling of steel from automobiles is estimated to save the equivalent energy necessary to power 18 million homes every year.”
Steel’s recycling efficiencies not only optimize resource use but also reduce energy consumption, given that remelting scrap into new steel requires much less energy than with virgin feedstock.
According to a recent Life Cycle Assessment report, these savings contribute to the recently announced 11% reduction in structural steel’s embodied carbon footprint. Other factors influencing this positive trend include improvements in furnace technology, energy sources, and material inventory management.
A related pivotal advance concerns the growing use of Electric Arc Furnace (EAF) technology, which processes recycled feedstock with electricity. According to Jonathan Tavarez, Structural Steel Specialist at the American Institute of Steel Construction, EAF technology has roughly 75% less embodied carbon than Basic Oxygen Furnaces (BOFs, the traditional, carbon-intensive method) on a global scale.
Energy Tracker Asia reports that EAFs can produce steel with a mere 0.68 metric tons of CO₂ per ton of material instead of 2.33 metric tons using BOF. Notably, 70% of steel produced in the U.S. is made with EAFs.
In addition to environmental improvements in steel, technological innovations include novel hybrid systems, seismic design strategies, fireproofing enhancements, material composition, and reduced construction time. Growing in popularity are castellated or cellular beams, exhibiting long spans with a deeper-than-typical shape, that are 40% stronger but with the same weight per foot.
Hybrid steel-mass timber systems that capitalize on the strengths of steel and wood are also in development. New full-height spray-applied fireproofing will reduce the overall resources required for fire protection.
In a talk titled “Steel Innovations: Past, Present, and Future,” AISC researchers Devin Huber and Christopher Raebel highlighted the composite SpeedCore system, which utilizes Shuriken bolted connections, FastFloor Modules, and other strategies that facilitate the “Need for Speed” initiative to halve the steel erection time in 2019 standards by 2025. Longer-term aspirations include achieving “unobtanium” steel with super-high stiffness and steel that incorporates its own fireproofing.
Unsurprisingly, another popular topic at the conference was advances in digital fabrication, including artificial intelligence and robotics. Lectures like “Robots, cowboys and other bots: how production can affect your bottom line” addressed the labor and economic dimensions of automation, while other presentations focused on using AI in design and fabrication.
Peter Dumont, president of Threecore, surveyed the swiftly changing field of AI tools and gave a preview of the staggering capabilities of Agentic AI. He shared AI application aggregator sites such as OpenRouter and the AI Agents Directory, which feature over 370 models and 1150 agents, respectively.
Agentic AI will bring significant productivity gains, including radical reductions in overhead and increased throughput. Such a contribution will be welcomed in a global industry that loses $1.6 trillion annually due to inherent inefficiencies. Without fail, Dumont and other speakers maintained that technological automation should not be used to reduce the human labor pool but to increase overall productivity.
Regardless, the relationship between humans and machines is changing rapidly and will require continuous adaptation. “We are moving from an era where people make decisions supported by machines to one where machines are making decisions guided by people,” said Laurent Lefouet, Chief Strategy Officer at Aera Technology. Perhaps nowhere will this transformation be more palpable than in the building construction industry.
