Steel is widely used in construction due to its strength, versatility and durability. However, steel is also one of the largest emitters of carbon, responsible for between 7 and 9 per cent of man-made carbon-dioxide emissions globally, according to the World Steel Association. Mlion Corporation, a local steel solutions provider, intends to lower the carbon footprint of steel by promoting the recycle and reuse of steel products to save them from the scrapyard. This month, it launches its GoListid online portal for contractors to list their pre-owned steel for other contractors in the region to buy. The development of this innovative marketplace, in what is considered a traditional industry, creates another revenue stream for Mlion Corporation, complementing its core business of producing and supplying new steel material for waterfront and underground construction projects. More Sustainable Use of Steel On the purpose of GoListid, Eric Leong, the company’s chairman and chief executive officer, explains that not all steel structures used in construction are permanent structures. Some are used temporarily, to be removed after the concrete is cast. This ‘temporary steel’ – he estimates to account for about 10 per cent of all steel used in a project – can weigh thousands of tonnes and cost millions of dollars. “The trouble is a lot of the contractors do not know where to sell the used steel as they are not traders with access to a broader market,” Leong remarks. “They end up scrapping the material, which in a few years, they have to buy again for their next project.” He finds the scrapping of this steel “completely wasted and unnecessary”, adding that the ‘temporary steel’, with a life span of about 10 years, can be used a few more times. The reuse of pre-owned steel also reduces the need for new steel to be manufactured. “We wanted to create GoListid as a place where contractors can offload this material so it can be repurposed and recycled,” Leong explains. “We wanted to aggregate all the supply and all the demand to give steel a new lease of life so that it does not just end up in scrap.” With this option, contractors can also improve their bottom lines in a competitive industry where margins are thin. Leong thinks that if the pre-owned steel could be offered at a 20 to 25 per cent discount to the price of new steel, buyers would be interested to use GoListid. It would also fetch higher prices for sellers because in comparison, scrapping the steel would garner only about 30 per cent of the price of new steel. Leong gauges that in Singapore alone, there is about $500 million worth of pre-owned steel that can be reused each year. As the GoListid portal will reach buyers and sellers in Indonesia, Thailand and the Philippines, he estimates his total regional market at about $1.9 billion of pre-owned steel annually. Mlion Corporation will earn a success fee of about 5% for the transaction, as the middleman, for its role in repurposing, storing and transporting the steel material. It will also provide a transparent and unbiased assessment of the quality of the steel using its own proprietary grading system, which could incorporate artificial intelligence and machine learning in the future. Smarter Steel Going beyond the grading process, Mlion Corporation devised another innovation to tag the steel products, which would promote the reselling and reusability of steel. Leong explains that as steel products look similar, the industry traditionally tracked the material’s specifications by attaching stickers to the products. Once the stickers fell off, the information was lost.   “Without an ability to track and trace some of these origins, how would we know how to use the steel effectively?” Leong recalls asking himself.  “Why can't we make our steel smarter? Why can't we make the material talk to us?” These questions led to the development of the GoTagID solution, also launching this month, to improve the traceability of steel. GoTagID is a unique tag attached to each steel product that records information such as its origin, history, certifications and inspection data as a “single source of truth” that can be retrieved from the Cloud. When developing GoTagID, Leong’s team had to look at how the tags could be robust enough to withstand harsh construction conditions for five to 10 years out in the field. This includes surviving impact shocks, abrasions, temperatures of up to 150 degrees and even seawater conditions for waterfront constructions. The team also combined RFID (radio-frequency identification) and OCR (optical character recognition) technologies to ensure it could read the data reliably from the tags. Mlion Corporation plans to tag the new steel products it supplies and the pre-owned steel materials it handles as a middleman. But the company has bigger plans for GoTagID in the future. For one, it is looking at including sensors with the tag to capture more information on the steel. It also sees a market potential to apply the tags onto other materials apart from steel. Innovative Spirit Many of Mlion Corporation’s innovations, which solve practical challenges in the construction industry, are concepts the company learnt from other industries. For example, its GoListid portal is like “an eBay for reusable steel”, while RFID tagging is commonly used in retail inventories. The company also borrowed an idea from the futures exchange to create a method of fixed pricing to help contractors hedge their steel prices for more cost control over a project duration. As a new kid on the block, back in 2011, Mlion Corporation knew it could not be selling a standardised solution if it wanted to compete with the big and established players.  “The construction industry, in particular the steel industry, has been very traditional; it has not changed much over the last 20 to 30 years,” Leong observes. “What we have done since the very beginning is not go down that road of being a stockholding entity; we have to be innovative in our solution.” This includes incorporating technology in its products and services and how it runs its business. It also includes customising solutions and exploring engineering innovations to improve the performance of steel. Leong believes that Mlion Corporation’s innovative spirit has made a competitive difference over the years. “We are one of the few companies in the steel industry that are still owned by the founders up to today… and the only one that has been profitable for the last 11 years in existence,” he says.