Already one of the country’s largest recyclers of construction and demolition waste, Boral Recycling is on track to deliver its biggest year yet.
While we’ve offered recycled products for over a decade, in the last few years we’ve dramatically increased our focus in this area, growing our footprint, the team and the types of materials we accept and produce.
We visited our newest Recycling site at Salisbury in the northern suburbs of Adelaide, and we spoke with General Manager Recycling Andre Gobett to understand our Boral Recycling business and growth ambition.
Strength to strength in South Australia
The Salisbury Quarry, in the northern suburbs of Adelaide, opened over 30 years ago. During that time, it served our business and customers with quarry product.
Just over a decade ago it also began offering recycling solutions, mainly ‘clean’ concrete and bricks achieving between 50-100,000 tonnes per annum of recycled product sales over the last five years.
It has just recently transitioned to become the first of our stand-alone recycling sites in South Australia offering a greater range of recycled material solutions including sand, fill and glass.
Our next goal is to reach 200-300,000 tonnes per annum of recycled product sales, including:
- Blended virgin and recycled products
- Glass inclusions
- Reclaimed Asphalt Pavement and concrete returns
- Recycled decorative aggregates and more
“It’s great to be ramping up recycling in South Australia. Thanks to the great collaboration between our Recycling and Quarries local team, Salisbury is now operational as a Recycling site and we’ve already got plans underway to add a second site to service customers and projects in the southern suburbs of Adelaide.”
Andre Gobett, GM Recycling
Why is recycling a good business for Boral?
There are a few reasons why recycling is a good business for us. As we generate our concrete and asphalt waste, being able to accept those volumes in our Recycling sites and convert them back into products to be sold back into the industry is a ‘win-win’ for us. We can also accept and process waste materials from other sources, including volumes generated by our customers – leading to a win for Boral and our customers.
Our products are well suited to incorporating recycled content into their mixes. Every tonne of quarry product we replace with recycled content extends the life of our precious Quarry assets.
Our recycling operations also contribute to Boral’s sustainability targets by diverting waste from landfill, reducing our overall carbon emissions and providing waste-based fuel for use at our Berrima site.
What’s driving our recent recycling growth?
Australia’s population growth and significant investment in infrastructure have led to an increase in construction and demolition waste over the last decade.
Our customers are demanding more recycled content across our range of concrete, asphalt, quarries and cement products. Governments are also supporting more recycling overall and in our industry by setting recycling target rates, mandating the use of recycled content in products and offering support to establish new recycling operations, among other incentives and support.
What are some of the interesting things the team has been up to?
Our recycling team has engaged with some of our major customers including Mirvac, Multiplex, Meriton, Laing O’Rourke, John Holland, Winslow and many others, successfully implementing our ‘circular materials solution’ for their projects.
Our circular materials offering involves capturing the concrete waste generated on a project, directing it to our recycling site and then reporting to our customers on the end-use of their materials.
We’ve also just received support from Sydney Water to use recycled sand made from kerbside recycled glass bottles in their future projects. The sand is made from 40 per cent recycled glass that is crushed, double washed and cubecut into a sand bed for pipes. We recently used this product at Sydney Water’s Upper South Creek Advanced Water Recycling Centre.
We also supplied all the fine sand used to establish Penrith Beach from our Emu Plains Recycling site. The Emu Plains team used excavation materials from developments in the Eastern Suburbs as ‘raw feed’ to process and supply clean fine sand for Penrith Beach.
The roll-out of our Boral branded skip bins to collect our own concrete waste from our plants has been a success for both Recycling and Concrete – and we’ve got a lot more we can do in this space.
“Like for like, we grew the business results by around 30 per cent in FY23, we’re on track to grow in excess of 50 per cent this financial year. With sales volumes pushing close to three million tonnes for FY24. A testament to the teamwork, drive and commitment of our Recycling team, and the teams we work with. Onwards and upwards we go to achieve a lot more together.”
Andre Gobett, GM Recycling