UK construction companies are increasingly weighing steel’s carbon footprint in procurement, but project budgets limit the premiums they will pay for lower-emission material. Discussions at the Future of Green Steel conference in London on 28–29 October indicated that sustainability-related costs generally need to remain below approximately 2% of total project value to be commercially acceptable.
The discussions involved British construction companies, public-sector project developers, steel producers and Serbian and Southeast European fabricators. Buyers showed growing interest in environmental product declarations as a practical basis for assessing emissions associated with structural steel. Public-sector projects were identified as an emerging source of demand, particularly where procurement rules require developers to demonstrate environmental performance.
A bridge-project tender illustrated that buyers may accept a material premium when its effect on the overall construction budget is limited. It included steel produced through an electric-arc-furnace supply chain at a 5–10% premium on the material price. Premiums of €100–300 per tonne can considerably increase the cost of individual steel products without necessarily having a comparable effect on a project’s total budget.
Buyers indicated that environmental product declarations often shape their material preferences, while they have relatively limited appetite for complex debates over green-steel classification systems. Those distinctions remain important to steelmakers: scrap-based electric-arc-furnace production can produce relatively low-emission steel, while integrated blast-furnace producers seeking to decarbonise through alternative ironmaking technologies may face much larger investment requirements. Industrial policy faces the question of whether lower-carbon classifications should reward existing low-emission output or provide additional support for transforming emissions-intensive production.
For Serbian and Southeast European fabricators bidding for UK construction and infrastructure contracts, credible environmental product documentation may become increasingly important. The market advantage lies in documenting lower-emission steel performance in a form usable by customers and regulators, but a product-level declaration is not an automatic substitute for emissions verification under the UK Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism (CBAM). The UK CBAM is due to begin on 1 January 2027, creating separate regulatory requirements for covered steel imports. A supplier may need both a product carbon-footprint declaration for customer procurement and installation-level emissions evidence that meets the relevant CBAM calculation rules.