The right way

19 May 2022

Recycling asphalt waste is a solution to the material shortage problems.

Managing and procuring materials in the construction industry is rapidly becoming a concern, due to material shortages and rising costs. For example, let’s talk about asphalt: how many miles of new roads are being built, how many new projects need to be financed, and how many roads are under maintenance?

Suffice to say, the European’s road network has a total length of 86,992 miles (140.000km). Maintenance to repair potholes to prevent damaging vehicles is an enormous task. Building new roads and improving existing ones require plenty of materials.

The tasks behind maintaining roads involve removing the old asphalt and laying down a new layer. Recycling old materials requires taking time to crush everything down to usable size.

Now, the question is: how do you speed up this process?

In Austria, an earthmoving and logistics company owns a stationary plant to produce gravel and sand. Meanwhile, in their recycling centre, they collect and recycle C&D waste and asphalt from their construction sites and use it as recycled aggregate. To get this done, they installed a BF80.3 crusher bucket on their excavator, replacing their stationary crusher for the practicality of a moving unit. Allowing the company to produce material of different output sizes independently and simplifying their maintenance also reduces costs and saves time.

If you consider that asphalt can be recycled repeatedly, and that RAP is suitable for areas with heavy traffic because it makes roads more durable. Then you can also understand this next company’s choice to use an MB-L160 crusher bucket on their Caterpillar 924G loader to process vast quantities of asphalt. If you were to run the asphalt slabs through a stationary crusher, it would jam the crusher and creates prolonged downtime. On the other hand, MB’s jaw crusher makes everything easier and simpler.

Another major problem with road infrastructure is road maintenance. How much damage can cracks or potholes create? To vehicles and can affect safety itself. For this reason, to shorten maintenance times and reduce costs, a road works company installed an MB Crusher MB-L200 crusher bucket on its Manitou telehandler, recycled the crushed asphalt, and reused it for road maintenance.

Recycling asphalt provides the company, municipalities, and those who manage roads with several benefits: recycling materials means reducing purchasing and disposal costs and less dependency on a stationary production plant.

Moreover, recycling crushed asphalt is good for the environment as it reduces greenhouse emissions and limits the usage of non-renewable natural resources like gravel, sand and stones.

Crushing materials with MB’s units is even easier than expected. As our Austrian customer reminds us, “A great advantage is that the crusher bucket is straightforward to transport […], especially with hard-to-reach construction sites, road work in the mountains, or remote locations – and therefore, its versatility allows you to do more than what you typically could do: therefore, increasing the value of our work, of our construction sites while respecting the environment.”

Choosing the right path is often easier than you think.