Real and perceived barriers to steel reuse across the UK construction value chain

•Quantitative analysis of interview answers using a method derived from natural language processing.•Wide survey gives a global overview of barriers across the whole supply chain.•Results highlight strong discrepancy between perceived and experienced barriers.•Fabricators and demolition contractors experience the steepest difficulties in implementing steel reuse.•General contractors have the strongest potential to build the necessary trust across actors to implement steel reuse.

Although steel reuse has been identified as an effective method to reduce the carbon and energy impact of construction, its occurrence is shrinking in the UK. This can be partly explained by the many barriers which have been identified in the literature, but a detailed analysis of how these barriers affect different parts of the supply chain is still lacking. We show that there is a contrast between perceived higher costs and time required to employ reused steel and the assessments of realised projects. Using a novel ranking method inspired from the field of information retrieval (tf-idf), we have analysed interviews of actors across the supply chain to determine the acuteness of the perception of each barrier. We show that demolition contractors, stockists, and fabricators face specific barriers which each need to be addressed at their level. This is in contrast with more generic barriers present throughout the value chain which we show are probably more perception than reality. Finally, we suggest how supply chain integration could facilitate reuse and make it economically viable at scale.