ALEX FRASER’S ANSWER
TO ASPHALT
AS A COMPANY COMMITTED TO ACHIEVING CARBON NEUTRALITY, ALEX FRASER HAS CREATED POLYPAVE, AN ASPHALT PRODUCT THAT CAN CONTAIN HIGH VOLUMES OF RECYCLED MATERIALS INCLUDING PLASTIC, GLASS AND RAP. ROADS & INFRASTRUCTURE REPORTS.
W
hat do roads in the Yarra City Council, Redland City Council, Moreton Bay Regional Council, Maribyrnong City Council, Bayside City Council and more all have in common? The answer is recycled materials, brought together by Alex Fraser’s PolyPave. Despite being situated in drastically different climates, with varying vehicle loading demands these councils are all using PolyPave, an innovative asphalt product produced using recycled materials such as plastic, glass and RAP. The first applications of PolyPave took place in 2018 for the Yarra City Council, on the fringe of Melbourne’s CBD and home to lots of high traffic roads. Alex Fraser was contracted to repair and resurface roads in the municipality with PolyPave incorporating plastic, glass and RAP. Over the first two streets, approximately 7,300 two litre plastic 38
ROADS NOVEMBER 2020
bottles, 55,000 glass bottles and several tonnes of reclaimed asphalt pavement were recycled into the roads. The project reduced waste to landfill by 97.3 tonnes and cut carbon emissions by 633 kilograms. Since these works, PolyPave has been used across Australia to resurface roads, reduce landfill and cut carbon emissions. THE CREATION OF POLYPAVE Alex Fraser General Manger Brendan Camilleri says Alex Fraser’s Technical Manager Peter Lazarus was behind the creation of PolyPave. . “We are a innovative company focussed on sustainability, and we want to be as carbon neutral as possible, so we investigated ways we could achieve that. We looked at what had been happening overseas and worked out how we could incorporate selected recycled materials into our high-
performance pavements,” Camilleri says. “We went through extensive research and development work to see what materials we could incorporate and ensure any materials we used were not going to have a negative impact on pavement performance or be of any harm to our employees, the environment or the community.” There is a growing list of reasons the roads industry is looking to incorporate recycled materials including the Council of Australian Governments (COAG) waste export ban which includes, plastic, paper, tyres and glass. Technical Manager Peter Lazarus says creating a high-performance asphalt with maximum quality and sustainability benefits was the goal for Alex Fraser. “One of the key benefits of our unique manufacturing process is that we found a way to introduce HDPE plastics to the asphalt and incorporate them into asphalt’s
