Smith and Wallwork have been tracking their engineering materials use over the last 5 years. It makes fascinating reading seeing what materials go where. We have designed and delivered nearly 50,000m2 of buildings and used approximately 15,000t of concrete, 5,000t of timber and 2,000t of steel. We have used a Sankey diagram to illustrate on a project by project basis what goes where (see image below).

We are also recording live project material demand. Our order book at the moment is some 40,000m2 of building and to deliver that we will need to design (we estimate) 25,000t of concrete, 2,500t of timber and 1,500t of steel. So going forward our buildings are getting heavier, why is that?