15 per cent of Shropshire road repairs use recycled material

In 2018, Shropshire Council resurfaced 111km of roads, using about 75,000 tonnes of material to do it. About 10,000 tonnes of that had been recycled.

The council will now be looking to see how other councils and companies carry out the work to try to increase the amount of recycled material.

Andy Wilde, interim operations manager for highways at Shropshire Council, said: "It's something that's high on the agenda because there's a potential cost saving for us the more recycling we do, and it's high on the environmental agenda as well."

Because of the coal power stations in the area, there's a lot of tar in the network which makes recycling more challenging.

Tar is a carcinogenic and needs to be treated differently to other materials.

Despite that, tests on Shropshire's roads bring back a result of 75 per cent tar. It is expensive to get rid of, so a potential cost saving for the council is to recycle it and encapsulate it in the lower levels of construction.

"Tar has become the new asbestos in many ways," Mr Wilde said. "We're more aware of it, it causes a problem but also gives a solution that could be beneficial for us.

"When we go and do pothole repairs all that material gets stockpiled and stored and then, annually, we recycle 15,000 tonnes of material. In order to do that we need a new facility. It's on the agenda and there's a lot of benefit and revenue streams for us as an authority."

The council is aiming to increase the percentage of material recycled year on year, but a big jump could come if the area gets its own recycling facility for this sort of work. Existing depots in the area are no suitable for recycling the road materials.

Planners are looking at how to move forward on the plans, which are in the very early stages, and once those decisions have been made more can be done to increase the amount of material being recycled.