At Minster Group, we’re all about reducing waste and making road surfacing as sustainable as possible, and we use a variety of tools and techniques to help us achieve this.

The majority of jobs we undertake are completed with zero waste to landfill – with planings and other extracted material being routinely reused – and with smart ways of working to improve efficiency at every stage. 

For many years, we’ve been using Foambase technology from OCL Regeneration which allows us to recycle material that’s removed from roads. By doing this, we recycle approximately 90% of the material we remove from roads, helping to save around 20,000 tonnes of material from going to landfill each year. 

We’ve also taken our approach to recycling one step further by implementing an initiative which makes use of local authority waste and creates a new product for verge strengthening. 

Making use of waste 

As part of this initiative, we send our deployed lorries to local authority depots around the county on a daily basis, where they ‘hoover’ up all the recyclable waste. 

The waste is primarily recovered from the bins and stockpiles created by the local authority in their day-to-day operations and consists of products such as Macadam, concrete and hardcore. 

This waste is then brought to our HQ where it is crushed and screened into a Type 5 material. We have designed and developed this Type 5 material in collaboration with Lincs Laboratory, which is Lincolnshire County Council’s testing, data capture and consultancy centre for civil engineering and highway works. We then use the material across the county for verge strengthening, repairing roadsides that have been damaged by heavy vehicles. 

By doing this, we help to reduce the carbon footprint of road surfacing in Lincolnshire. We create around 10,000 tonnes of this type 5 material for verge strengthening each year and the alternative for this job would be quarried material. 

What’s more, we only send lorries to local authority depots that are already in the area completing a job, so there are no additional carbon emissions from the transportation of the material to our HQ. 

Looking to the future

Our ultimate goal is to be able to achieve a Type 1 status on this verge strengthening material and we’re working towards this with the help of Lincs Laboratory. This will help us to enhance our green credentials even further and build on the amazing progress we’ve already made over the years.

Across all our green efforts, we have calculated that we save at least 476 tonnes of CO2e per year, which is the same amount of CO2 that’s produced by 466 flights from London to New York.

So watch this space as we work to make these figures even more impressive!

To find out more about our sustainability initiatives, visit our service page or get in touch.