7 STEEL UK: Forging Resilience from Recycled Steel
Recycling UK scrap steel to create UK site ready steel construction products is the core of 7 Steel UK. Using electric arc furnaces to manufacture material that contains 98% recycled input, this is a business on a mission to drive circular principles in a challenging market sector. Business Development Manager Stuart Hand talks to Energy Focus about working through difficult conditions to deliver real value.
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Steel remains the backbone of the UK built environment, instrumental across rail lines, power stations and housing alike, yet the industry producing it has spent the best part of a decade absorbing shock after shock. Brexit uncertainty, a pandemic, a war in Europe that sent energy and scrap prices spiralling, and now a conflict in the Middle East compounding those pressures again, have tested every steelmaker operating on these shores. Against that backdrop, 7 Steel UK has refocussed, emerging from a change of ownership with a sharper identity: a domestic producer of low carbon, recycled steel, built to last through the cycle, offering strength, support, and simplicity.
Based at Castle Works, Cardiff, the business melts scrap in electric arc furnaces and rolls it into the reinforcing bar, coil and wire rod that underpin UK construction, transport and energy projects. The company is an industry leader with this technology, well versed in what is possible and leading the way forward. Business Development Manager Stuart Hand, who focuses on major projects including nuclear and defence work, sums up the operation. “We are a steel manufacturer that uses electric arc furnaces, no coal, with recycled scrap as our raw material. We produce steel billet from scrap in Cardiff,” he explains. “We have a recycling arm through which we handle a lot of our own collections, and we also partner with large scrap merchants. We rail the scrap to Cardiff before melting to billet and then sending to our rod and bar mill or our sections mill, where we produce around 1.2 million tonnes of finished product, loose cut and bent or reinforcement cages, ready for site each year.”
The company is structured around two complementary businesses 7 Steel UK and 7 Steel Service. “7 Steel Service has around 700 people and 7 Steel UK is home to around 1000 people,” says Hand, noting that the service arm is the result of a merger where four businesses were joined together creating a powerhouse with 250 years of combined experience. Between them, the two sides take scrap from collection through to finished reinforcement cages ready for site, a downstream operation built on the 650,000 tonnes of reinforcing bar produced annually by the rod and bar mill.
That structure follows a significant ownership change. Cardiff’s steelworks has operated since the 1970s, but 2025 brought a new chapter. “We are now 7 Steel UK and we were purchased from Celsa – the Spanish steel making business. 7 Global Investments, a firm based in Czechia, purchased the UK and Nordic business from Celsa in 2025, and part of the UK group was the mill and the service businesses,” Hand says. “We are now much more streamlined and that has been a really positive step for the business.”
The buyer, Sev.en Global Investments, combined the former Celsa Nordic and Celsa Steel UK operations under the unified 7 Steel brand, part of a stated ambition to build a pan-European circular steel platform. That ambition has since been backed with capital, with Sev.en confirming a £100 million investment programme for the Cardiff site in May 2026, covering a hydrogen furnace and operational improvements over four years, a commitment framed as proof that steel requires continuity, operational discipline and a willingness to invest through the cycle.
CIRCULAR AMBITION
Sustainability sits at the centre of that investment case. Finished product carries a minimum of 98% recycled content, all sourced from UK scrap and sold back into the UK market, a closed loop now being tightened further with the largest customers. “We are trying our hardest to promote circular economy principles where we can work with clients to remove any scrap that they have on their sites, bring that into the mill, melt it down and use that as new material to send back to the site,” Hand says. “That is a new concept for the industry and we have onboarded a few Tier 1 corporates that are working with us on that basis.”
Where blast furnaces rely on iron ore and coking coal, the melt shop runs on scrap and electricity, avoiding the carbon intensity typically associated with traditional steel making. “Blast furnaces are unsustainable, high carbon, and we have always used electric arc furnaces and that will continue to be our focus,” Hand notes, a position that increasingly aligns with the wider industry, with Tata Steel and British Steel both announcing their own transitions to electric arc technology in recent years. The British Stainless Steel Association points out that the UK already recycles 96% of the steel used in construction, even as the country still imports a significant share of its annual demand and exports much of the scrap it generates rather than processing it at home.
That gap between scrap generated and steel produced domestically is the opportunity 7 Steel UK is positioning itself to close. HS2 and Hinkley Point C both feature among its government-linked projects, alongside ongoing talks with Heathrow Airport about its long-running development programme. “Everything is centred around what we offer from a sustainability point of view because we realise that the product we produce has historically been done so through a dirty manufacturing process,” Hand says. “We are trying to make that as clean as possible in relation to some of the other methods of producing steel reinforcement.”
UK Steel figures put the scale of the wider opportunity in context, with government departments expected to require around eight million tonnes of steel for public projects over the next decade.
WEATHERING THE CYCLE
Despite reported opportunity, nothing has made the last few years straightforward. Hand highlights a sequence of disruptions the industry has absorbed. “The early stages of the Brexit process did produce a negative effect on investment into the UK and that impacted the construction market. Quickly after that we had the Covid pandemic which almost stopped industry entirely,” he says, adding that government-backed projects carried the business through both. A brief recovery followed, before the war in Ukraine drove up energy and steel pricing sharply, and “because the cost of construction went up so quickly, there was a downturn in demand from the market” that, Hand notes, “has not returned in full.”
Last year proved particularly tough, and the hoped-for rebound in 2026 has instead met fresh disruption. “Now we have another conflict in the Middle East and that is also impacting energy costs and scrap prices. All of this makes it difficult to build anything new,” Hand says. “There has been a lot of uncertainty around project approvals and that slows the market even further.”
The response has been discipline rather than retreat. “We have seen a reduction in capacity, and we have had to streamline some factories,” he says. “We have had to ensure that we match demand from the market and not carry too much capacity, but retain our ability to increase capacity as the market changes.”
That balancing act mirrors the wider mood across UK construction heading into 2026. PwC’s latest Construction and Housebuilding Outlook expects infrastructure output to accelerate toward real terms growth of 3-4% in 2026 and 2027, driven by record investment in power and water, while NatWest’s own sector outlook describes a year defined less by headline growth than by how firms manage cost pressures and client expectations around sustainability. For a business built on recycled input and domestic supply, that shift plays to 7 Steel UK’s strengths.
LOCAL SUPPLY CHAIN
That advantage is reinforced by a supply chain kept deliberately close to home. “Our key product is reinforcing steel and we are part of a group with a mill that supplies that product. Scrap merchants and energy suppliers are our key supply chain inputs, and we outsource haulage, manufacturing of mechanical splicing, and some technical support functions,” Hand says. “We have 14 fabrication depots around the UK and they work with partners that are local to them. We always look to UK partners, and we feel we have a sustainable model.”
From scrap collection through melting, rolling and fabrication to delivery on site, the business controls, or works closely with, every stage of the chain that turns end of life metal into new construction material.
It is that vertical integration, paired with a UK-only footprint, that Hand points to as the clearest point of difference in a crowded market. “Sustainable UK manufacturing for the UK market is our focus and that will continue,” he says. “Many others do not use electric arc furnaces, most others do not use recycled input, many focus on export, many follow outdated business models – we are made in the UK, for the UK.”
In an industry where overcapacity and import competition remain live concerns, that domestic focus is becoming a strategic necessity, echoed in UK Steel’s own calls for government departments to buy more of their steel at home.
With new capital behind it, a streamlined structure, and a customer base increasingly drawn to circular, low carbon materials, 7 Steel UK is well placed to build on that position, turning potential into progress. The wider steel sector still faces a difficult road, but businesses capable of turning UK scrap into UK infrastructure, reliably and close to where it is needed, are exactly the local players the market cannot afford to lose. For 7 Steel UK, that is not simply a survival strategy, but the case for why the country still needs strong steelmakers of its own.