Green green glass

RMC’s innovative use of waste glass in road construction is the kind of thing procurement policies need to encourage, says Noel Morrin

Finding new opportunities and innovative solutions to environmental problems, not only within our own immediate sphere of activity but also on waste and resource use more broadly, is part of RMC’s business philosophy. So our environmental commitment extends to sourcing waste materials from other industries, which we can incorporate into our products. Thanks to one such innovative product, Glasphalt, a lot of recycled glass can now be used in building roads.

Over a million bottles per mile, in fact, which would otherwise simply be destined for landfill. Glasphalt, a sub-surface road material launched by RMC in 2000, is 30% crushed glass, mixed with limestone and bitumen, and over 110,000 tonnes of it was used in road construction in the UK in 2002 alone. The recent refurbishment of a 4-km stretch of the M6 motorway in Cheshire incorporated 3,000 tonnes of recycled bottle bank glass - the equivalent of 14 million bottles - into the motorway surface layers, and Glasphalt used in renewal work on the M50 included 10,500 tonnes of recycled glass.

According to a recent independent study by Arena Network Wales, there are no technical or standards-related barriers to the use of waste glass as aggregate in roadstone. Although the best environmental option is making new bottles from old, the UK churns out more green waste glass than can be reused in this process - known as ‘thermal recycling’ - so turning some of it into Glasphalt instead is a good complement to reuse in the container industry. It is also appropriate, the study found, when the waste glass is simply too far from a container factory to be transported economically.

The study pointed out that use of waste glass in Glasphalt has the benefit of being tolerant of contaminants commonly encountered in material from local authority collection schemes. Widespread acceptance of glass as an aggregate replacement in road building, it concluded, offers a useful additional outlet for glass waste other than landfill, capable of accommodating large volumes, and formal HAPAS (Highway Authorities Product Approval Scheme) approval of products such as Glasphalt would help to overcome the natural reluctance to change that comes from unfamiliarity. This highlights an important issue with regard to more widespread use of sustainable products.

The UK government’s Waste and Resources Action Programme (WRAP) is already calling on local authorities and construction firms to recycle asphalt planings into the upper layers of roads in order to reduce demand for high-grade primary aggregates. The use of Glasphalt offers similar environmental benefits. Local authorities and other public sector organisations are increasingly under pressure to have sustainable procurement policies in place, as part of a UK-wide drive towards more sustainable patterns of consumption and production.

The new UK waste recovery targets will undoubtedly give added impetus to how industry and business can help achieve these goals. Both public and private sectors alike now need to take a serious look at their existing procurement policies, and to specify, wherever possible, the use of recycled materials. This would go a long way to encouraging the uptake of more sustainable products - and would also encourage industry to invest more in their development.

Organisations who lose business because they can’t compete with more sustainable alternatives - or, worse, don’t even make the tender list - would quickly start to see the benefits of sustainable manufacturing processes. RMC is committed to developing innovative solutions within the construction materials industry - to drive and develop new markets for more sustainable products.

Of course, we also hope we will gain a competitive advantage. We believe that playing a proactive role in that process will ultimately benefit the environment, our customers and our business. Without this approach we would simply not have a business with a viable, successful or long-term future.

Noel Morrin is international environment director
of RMC Group plc.

7 July 2004

Noel Morrin