The construction and civil engineering industries have long been seen as huge contributors to waste in the UK. According to the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra), the UK construction industry produces around 100 million tonnes of waste every year. 

It can be easy to assume that road surfacing and roadworks are some of the key contributors to this huge amount of waste generated by the construction industry. And there’s no wonder why, because the industry is seen as dirty, pollutive and resource intensive.

But actually, asphalt is one of the world’s most recyclable materials – it is widely recycled around the world and it’s increasingly being recycled in the UK. The technology does exist to reduce civil engineering waste by recycling materials and, here at Minster, we have been at the cutting edge of green civil engineering for many years.

What is construction waste management?

Construction waste management is the way that construction companies deal with their waste, including any steps they take to reduce the amount of waste produced. 

Although there is no longer a legal requirement for companies to have a site waste management plan, all companies working within construction and civil engineering have a duty of care towards managing their waste under Section 34 of the Environmental Protection Act 1990. 

With this in mind, a waste management plan is still a useful tool to have, providing a structure for waste delivery and disposal. Plans should detail the amount and type of waste that will be produced by a project, as well as how the waste will be reused, recycled or disposed of. 

How to reduce waste in civil engineering

The civil engineering industry can generate waste from a number of different sources, whether this is through poor planning, errors, changes or delays. But this can be managed and minimised by applying the waste hierarchy and principles, which is a legal requirement. 

The waste hierarchy is set out by Defra and includes:

• Prevention – using less material in design and manufacture, keeping products for longer, reusing products and using less hazardous materials 
• Preparing for reuse – checking, cleaning, repairing and/or refurbishing materials
• Recycling – turning waste into a new substance or product, including composting waste if it meets quality protocols 
• Other recovery – this includes things such as anaerobic digestion (bacteria breaking down organic matter in the absence of oxygen), incineration with energy recovery and gasification 
• Disposal – landfill and incineration without energy recovery 

The aim of the waste hierarchy is to outline priorities for how waste should be handled – with prevention, reuse and recycling being the most important and disposal being the last option.

How do you manage waste on a roadworks site? 

The best way that waste can be reduced on a roadworks site is through recycling. This is something that Minster Group has been doing for many years and we take a circular economy approach to every job we do. 

Where possible, we use cutting edge technology to recycle old road surfaces into new ones – either on-site or at our recycling plant. And even for smaller jobs, we still aim for zero waste, with planings we remove from the old road surface being recycled for use on other infrastructure projects. 

We utilise an on-site closed loop manufacturing process developed by OCL Regeneration and have a mobile recycling plant which produces CBGM and Foambase, which are high quality alternatives to hot asphalt. We can also produce binder course products made using the material we’ve removed from old roads. 

Through the use of Foambase technology, we can create a foamed bitumen product made from recycled materials including asphalt, concrete and rubble. What’s more, it can even be used to safely recycle material containing coal-tar, which is deemed hazardous if not handled and used correctly. 

With the Environment Agency classifying asphalt waste that contains coal-tar as hazardous, many companies won’t touch it and it has to be disposed of. This means that even if the material contains just 0.1% coal-tar, all of it goes to waste. But this wasteful practice can easily be avoided – even material which is over 0.1% coal-tar can be safely reused in line with environmental and local authority standards, as a base layer for a new road. 

Road surfacing is a rapidly transforming industry, with green innovations saving hundreds of thousands of tonnes of waste going to landfill. To find out more about our recycling initiatives, why not visit our recycling page or contact us directly?