Increasing the use of recycled aggregates in highway works can help reduce costs, as well as cutting down on the use of virgin materials, landfilled waste and carbon dioxide emissions, a new study has confirmed.
A study of recycling in Hampshire, by TRL, found that 686,000 tonnes of recycled and secondary aggregates were used in the county each year, mainly in low-value unbound materials.
This represented more than 13% of total aggregate use and included construction and demolition waste, asphalt planings from highway maintenance works and spent railway ballast.
By ‘stretching best practice’, making more use of construction, demolition and excavation wastes, upping recycling in highway works, and using incinerator bottom ash from the county’s three energy-from-waste plants, this could be increased to 1.1M tonnes each year by 2020 – or 22% of the total.
But it would require additional construction of waste-recycling centres and a site for processing incinerator ash.
Up to 20% of these aggregates could then be used in higher-value applications, such as concrete and asphalt, concluded TRL.
Its study fed into Hampshire’s material resources strategy report More is less, published last month by the county council, Portsmouth and Southampton city councils, and the Project Integra waste partnership. Hampshire’s approach to stakeholder consultation is held up as a model for other authorities looking to boost recycling as part of an overall sustainability strategy.
The proportion of highway maintenance materials recycled in the county soared from 10% in 1997-98 to 66% in 2000-01.
But the study estimated that the 45,000 tonnes recycled in 2003-04 could be more than doubled to 100,000 tonnes a year by 2010. Cllr ~Tim Knight~, Hampshire’s executive member for environment, said that ‘innovative practices like these are an example of what can be done’.
According to TRL there were now fewer serious barriers to the use of recycled and secondary aggregates, but it added that higher priority needed to be given by the Waste and Resources Action Programme (WRAP) to finalising a quality protocol for pulverised fuel ash, steel slag and incinerator bottom ash aggregate, which could be more widely used in construction.
Maximising recycling in local authority highway works: the experience of ~Hampshire County Council~ (TRL651).
www.trl.co.uk
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