UK engineers started with previously unwanted steel instead of a bridge design; they built the Tan House Footbridge around the available material to cut embodied carbon

A new footbridge in Wokingham, UK, was designed around steel that had already been used or was previously considered unwanted. The approach allowed engineers to rethink the bridge design based on the material that was already available. According to the research published in The Structural Engineer, titled ‘ Tan House Footbridge: Designing with repurposed steel, from early design stages to fabrication ’, the bridge was designed, detailed and fabricated between February 2022 and October 2024.