This article was first published in The Structural Engineer on 2 February 2026.

Anna Beckett believes that as structural engineers we must learn to share our experiences, innovations and failures more openly if the pace of sustainability change is to accelerate.

It’s a Tuesday morning and I am running late as usual, which is being made worse by all the trains on the Northern Line being held in the stations, when a message pops up on my phone; “could I just pick your brain about steel reuse?”. This isn’t a message from one of my colleagues or even someone I studied with, it’s an engineer from another company that I know from cycling. And so, while I’m waiting for the Northern Line to sort itself out, we have a discussion about steel reuse. An open discussion, about the guidance that’s available, the things that are easy, the things to look out for and how to bring the whole design team on the journey with you.

While I’d like to think that I’m an open, approachable person, I know that conversation wouldn’t have happened without The Engineers Reuse Collective (tERC). My involvement with the group has taken away the barrier of being part of a different company and allowed engineers to see that these are conversations that benefit all of us.

We talk about collaboration a lot in the construction industry, and engineers are great at collaborating with architects, clients and contractors, but collaboration between engineers is often a little more cautious. We don’t want to give too much away, particularly if we’re doing something that gives us a competitive advantage, and we’re rarely open about our mistakes (in many cases we’re legally not allowed to be). But the result isn’t that everyone manages to be innovative simultaneously, in lots of different ways, as we might hope. The result is that we all try and fail in the same ways. We all make the same mistakes behind closed doors, and the industry moves forwards at a glacial pace.

For real industry-wide change to happen we must be prepared to share what we’ve learnt, and when it comes to sustainability, the speed at which change is required really means we all need to work together. This idea is at the heart of many of the pledges we’ve all already signed up to. The Structural Engineers Declare pledge commits us to collaborating with clients, architects, engineers and contractors, and to sharing knowledge and research on an open-source basis. Steel Zero and Concrete Zero similarly expect signatories to share data on the projects they’ve worked on each the year.

Structural engineers need to collaborate far more with one another if the sustainability performance of our projects is to improve at the pace now required. Many of the biggest sustainability gains, such as reusing existing structures, reducing material intensity and avoiding over-design, rely on judgement, precedent, and confidence rather than new technology. Opportunities to retain structures or reuse components are often constrained not by technical impossibility, but by fragmented practice, uneven experience, and a tendency for individual engineers or firms to default to conservative assumptions in isolation.

When you’re trying to work out how to do something new it rarely works out the first time. But instead of separate engineering companies trying and failing in the same way, wouldn’t it make much more sense for us to be open about the things that didn’t work so others can try something different instead? That might not work either, but together, we’re much more likely to make meaningful progress than we are alone. By collaborating with peers, we can compare approaches, challenge ingrained norms, and build collective confidence in delivering new ways of working and delivering projects.

It’s this thinking that led to the formation of The Engineers Reuse Collective. As well as thinking differently about the ways we are using materials, we’re also thinking differently about collaboration and what that really means. We’re thinking about how we can work together as a profession to reduce the amount of material we’re using. Reuse demands shared learning, consistency of approach, and collective confidence in non-standard solutions, all of which require greater collaboration. We are trying to find ways to share knowledge, share failures and make meaningful change across the industry.

As tERC enters its second year, we’re hoping that this open and collaborative approach can lead to some really exciting innovation for the whole industry. We’re actively sharing and showcasing member case studies, working to secure funding for research projects, and we’re collaborating on an Arup-led prototype re-use project.

Anna Beckett is an Associate Director at Buro Happold and a Steering Group member of The Engineers Reuse Collective.