As 2025 draws to a close, it’s clear this has been a year of transformation and momentum for Aotearoa New Zealand’s steel manufacturing industry and for HERA.

The national conversation around sustainability and circular design has matured significantly, with steel once again proving itself to be the rockstar of the circular economy.

One of the biggest milestones for our sector was undoubtedly the announcement of the Electric Arc Furnace (EAF) at New Zealand Steel.

This long-anticipated investment represents a major step forward for domestic steelmaking, enabling the production of lower-carbon steel from locally recycled scrap. It’s a tangible example of how industry can decarbonise while strengthening regional manufacturing resilience.

The EAF signals a new era where circularity, innovation, and sustainability sit at the core of our national manufacturing.

At HERA, we’ve seen that growing interest in low-carbon and circular design first-hand. Our newly released update to “How to Specify Low Carbon Steel” guide, has rapidly become our most downloaded publication, reflecting the appetite among engineers, designers, and specifiers to make informed material choices that reduce embodied carbon.

This surge in demand shows that Aotearoa New Zealand’s construction and manufacturing sectors are ready to move from ambition to action.

Circularity goes beyond just lowering emissions. It’s about designing systems that keep materials in use for as long as possible and few materials perform better than steel in this regard.

That’s why one of HERA’s proudest achievements in 2025 was launching our Low-Carbon Circular Design Guidance. This guidance provides a practical framework for designers and manufacturers to apply circular economy principles in real projects, helping to close the loop between design, fabrication, and reuse.

It showed that >50% reductions in carbon emissions were readily achievable through clever design and material selection.

This work has been further strengthened by our successful application for Building Research Levy funding to develop Aotearoa New Zealand’s first digital material passport.

This initiative will create a system that records and shares material data across a product’s lifecycle, enabling easier reuse, remanufacture, and recycling.

By improving traceability, we are helping to ensure that steel can continue to be the backbone of sustainable construction  not just once, but over multiple lifetimes.

In parallel, we’ve advanced our own commitment to sustainability through the construction of the HERA Industry X.0 Innovation Centre.

After years of planning, construction is now well underway, marking a significant milestone for our organisation and the wider industry.

The Centre will be a national hub for applied research, industry training, and collaboration; designed to accelerate our journey towards advanced manufacturing and circular innovation. It will also be a 6-star greenstar building.

Our focus on circular design and environmental accountability was also reflected in our planetary accounting assessment of the Innovation Centre, which is the first of its kind in the world.

Unlike traditional carbon accounting, planetary accounting measures environmental performance across multiple boundaries, including water use, biodiversity, and pollution.

Through this lens, we predict that future sustainability conversations will move well beyond carbon, recognising the interconnected nature of our planet’s ecological systems.

We are also proud of the strong international partnerships that have supported this direction, particularly with the Australian Composites Manufacturing Cooperative Research Centre (CRC).

Together, we are exploring the intersections of AI, automation, and circular design. These areas that will be essential to the future competitiveness and sustainability of heavy engineering.

This supports our focus on circular design in our MBIE Endeavour funded project focused on Construction 4.0.

Supporting our growing focus on circularity, HERA welcomed Structural Sustainability and Circular Economy Engineer, Osama Mughrabi, to our team this year. Osama’s expertise will strengthen our ability to support members and projects that are navigating the transition to low-carbon, circular futures.

This will ensure that Aotearoa New Zealand’s heavy engineering industry continues to lead in responsible innovation.

In many ways, 2025 has been the year that circularity became more than a concept. It became a movement. From low-carbon steel production to digital traceability, from circular design frameworks to world-first environmental assessments, HERA and our partners have demonstrated that sustainability and industry performance go hand in hand.

Looking ahead to 2026, HERA’s focus is on enabling a high-tech, low-environmental impact manufacturing, fabrication and design future – one where automation, digital tools, and beyond-carbon circular-thinking drive both competitiveness and sustainability.