Ready, steady, recycle!
We are committed to finding innovative, sustainable and cost-effective ways to carry out our highways maintenance programme.
In the north of the county, we have completed five in-situ road recycling repair schemes – Osier Way, Buckingham; Neptune Road, Swanbourne; The Spans, Brill; Westcott Road, Nether Winchendon; and Waddesdon Hill, Aylesbury.
The purpose of in-situ recycling is to effectively restore a failed road by recycling and reusing the existing construction materials to create a new road surface with strength and life expectancy that is equal to that of a traditionally designed and reconstructed road. The process includes crushing the existing carriageway into fine particles and then spreading and mixing those particles with a cement-like powder to create a strong, binding material layer. Throughout the process the materials are trimmed, graded and compacted to return the recycled layer back to the road before an asphalt (a thick, sticky, black material) surfacing or surface dressing is applied.
By recycling and reusing the materials in-situ, the speed of construction can be 4x faster than traditional methods - meaning our teams are on the network for as short amount of time as possible, minimising the impact of the ‘roadworks’. Traditionally, resurfacing schemes result in the disposal of significant volumes of waste materials, the use of virgin aggregates (products which have been newly mined from the ground e.g. sand, gravel, rocks and stone) and hot bituminous bound material, but with in-situ recycling this is greatly reduced resulting in a considerably lower carbon footprint of the scheme overall.
Across the five schemes, approximately 30,000m² (equivalent to the size of four football pitches!) of road surface has been repaired, using 14,000 tonnes of recycled material. When compared to traditional methods of construction, we saved 600 tonnes of carbon (that’s roughly the same as what 2-3 secondary schools or between 12 and 30 primary schools produce in a year*) and saved 1,386 lorry trips which would have been required to transport materials and waste to and from site.
*Reducing carbon emissions in the education sector | Lloyds Bank