21 June 2015
The project is conceived under the drive to meet sustainability requirements

Abu Dhabi - The Abu Dhabi City Municipality is currently assessing the feasibility of recycling cold asphalt at site and applying it in revamping road layers, thus obviating the need to transport materials to the project site.

The project stems from the keenness of the municipal system of Abu Dhabi to address the needs & standards of sustainability in all projects such that they become a guiding reference to all projects undertaken in the capital city Abu Dhabi & suburban areas. The overall objective of the process is to nurture a sustainable future aligned with the highest global standards and in line with Abu Dhabi 2030 Plan aimed at making Abu Dhabi a model of a sustainable metropolitan cities.

Under this context, the Municipality indicated that maintenance & rehabilitation of roads used to be carried out through removing impacted asphalt layers and re-paving them using fresh materials; an exercise which involves the consumption & exhaustion of natural resources, besides raising the carbon footprint of maintenance & rehabilitation of road projects. So the main objective of this project was to explore the possibility of re-using recycled asphalt in rehabilitating and maintaining roads.

The Municipality has applied this procedure tentatively in Street 16 at Shahama in an area spanning 2000 square meters. The infrastructure sustainability team at the Municipality conducted a comprehensive study about various phases of the project covering assessing the road condition through site inspections, discussing different scenarios of rehabilitating the road, taking sample for lab & site tests, and considering different design options for rehabilitating the road from technological, financial and environmental perspectives. The study also focused on the time needed to complete the project, and came up with a number of findings.

The project concluded that using the cold asphalt technology in rehabilitating roads is viable from technological and financial aspects, besides contributing to minimizing the use of natural resources needed for road construction. It also saves power needed to extract & transport raw materials, besides slashing the duration of completing road rehabilitation projects. The procedure will thus conserve the environment and bring about a host of social benefits, besides meeting the standards & requirements of sustainable development in road projects.

The recycling and re-using of asphalt has yielded multiple benefits such as achieving a 100% use of road materials, accelerating the project completion period by 75% compared to normal road maintenance operations, reducing maintenance costs by 25%, minimizing carbon emission by 80%, saving the use of raw materials by 80%, cutting 26 trips of heavy vehicles used to be needed to transport stone from quarries to the project site, and slashing the road traffic loads by 200 pivotal weight.

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© Press Release 2015