Circular Economy
Utilising RAP
“The more RAP we add and fuel we save mixing warm mix
materials, the more we help reduce our carbon emissions and
preserve our natural resources for future generations.”
Damon Green, Operations Manager for Agecroft and Bredbury
Recycled Asphalt Planings (RAP) is an important product for Tarmac, and in 2024, we used over one million tonnes of it. By reclaiming and reusing ‘planings’ from road
resurfacing projects, we create RAP, which can be used to replace a certain proportion of aggregates and bitumen in asphalt. This reduces our carbon emissions and helps
deliver our circularity commitment by reusing waste material in our products.
Our Agecroft and Bredbury plants have benefitted from sustainability improvements after making upgrades to their RAP systems.
The fitting team at Agecroft has designed and installed new silver ducting on site. This ducting will reduce blockages of filler dust experienced with the old system, which was
preventing the team from maximising its RAP addition. Thanks to this upgraded system and warm mix additives, the plant can now put up to 40% RAP addition in base and binder materials and warm mix materials, and up to 20% in surface course materials and hot rolled asphalt (HRA) materials.
Our Bredbury team can also now achieve those same figures for RAP additions, which the team attributes to operational colleagues working closely with the technical department to achieve positive outcomes. Using warm mix materials also reduces fuel use, resulting in less emissions from the site.
Damon Green, operations manager for Agecroft and Bredbury, said: “The development of the RAP system has been a great example of collaborative working. Our mixer colleagues communicated with the fitters, who then went away to design the systems. The result was a complete redesign of the systems, including sweeping bends and a ‘T’ piece back into the bag house, to achieve the results we have.”
