Boral has put forward a proposal to tackle two challenging Gold Coast City-building issues - a looming shortage of construction materials for Gold Coast roads, buildings and infrastructure projects, and landfill constraints.
Boral’s Executive General Manager Queensland Paul Noakes said the company’s application to unlock this State Key Resource Area at Reedy Creek together with the West Burleigh Construction Waste and Resource Recovery Project, provides a considered proposal that would continue the journey of building a better future for Gold Coasters and the surrounding region.
“Boral has been an integral part of the Gold Coast through supplying more than 40 million tonnes of quarry construction materials over the past half century to the Gold Coast’s building and construction industry,” Mr Noakes said.
“The Gold Coast population is projected to reach 1 million by 2046. This requires an additional 161,700 homes and supporting critical urban infrastructure like waste management facilities. The surrounding region is predicted to tip to 5.9 million by 2046 which requires almost 840,000 new dwellings.
“Failing to plan for this future could result in aggregate supply shortages, skyrocketing construction costs and house prices, heavily congested roads and a significant shortage of critical strategic infrastructure and landfill space to cope with the expanding population.”
The twin proposals would see 26 per cent of the 216.7 hectare Reedy Creek site used for quarry development. The current West Burleigh Quarry would transition to resource recovery activities integrated with landfill for construction waste and assist in relieving the strain on the City’s diminishing landfill capacity.
“Feedback and consultation undertaken in recent years has been incorporated into these new proposals, with a reduction in the quarry area a key difference to the past Reedy Creek application,” Mr Noakes said. “There’s been significant thought to the environment which includes protecting 74 per cent of the Reedy Creek site.”
“If there is no replacement for the West Burleigh Quarry in the southern Gold Coast area, construction materials would need to be transported from the City’s north leading to an extra 31,000 extra heavy vehicles on the road annually to meet market demand.”
Boral is lodging its submission on Friday April 4.
Information about this development application, including links to the submitted application documents (once they are made public via the Gold Coast City Council’s website post-lodgement) is available at www.reedycreekwestburleighprojects.com.au
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About Boral
Boral is the largest vertically-integrated construction materials company in Australia.
Our network includes prized quarry and cement infrastructure, bitumen, construction materials recycling, asphalt and concrete batching operations.
We employ about 7,500 employees and contractors across our operations that span more than 360 sites nation-wide.
For more than 75 years we’ve been building something great in Australia - rarely a day goes by that you wouldn’t pass one of our sites or trucks, enter a building, use a road, bridge, tunnel, footpath or other critical infrastructure that our people and products have helped enable.
About Boral in Queensland and on the Gold Coast
Boral has more than 1,100 employees in Queensland, working across an integrated network of quarries, concrete batching and asphalt operations.
Over the past half century, Boral has supplied more than 40 million tonnes of quarry construction materials to the Gold Coast building and construction industry – a major economic pillar of the Gold Coast economy.
In the past 10 years alone, materials from our Gold Coast operations have enabled a number of key regional infrastructure projects including Gold Coast Airport upgrades, the Tugan Bypass, stages of the Gold Coast Light Rail, multiple Pacific Motorway (M1) upgrades, the Gold Coast Commonwealth Games Precinct and the Coomera Connector.
Through our integrated Gold Coast operations, spanning hard rock quarries with recycling capability, and downstream concrete batching and asphalt manufacturing plants, we have provided the essential raw and manufactured construction materials needed to build critical urban infrastructure to support the City’s continued growth including motorways, roads, bridges, hospitals, light rail, along with the delivery of a range of residential housing.