Recycling

As a major producer and consumer of construction materials, Colas has developed ways to recover and recycle waste produced in road construction as well as materials resulting from demolition or renovation from public works or other industries:

• recycling plants: it is estimated that the average annual per capita consumption of aggregates in the advanced countries has reached 7 tonnes (only per capita water consumption is higher), more than half of which is consumed in public works. These figures clearly show the recycling potential of the Group's business activities. Colas devotes considerable resources to this end, with a network of plants able to recover and treat all types of debris, construction materials and industrial waste to produce gravel and aggregates. In 2011, 11 million tonnes were recycled by Colas throughout the world, corresponding to 11% of the Group's total production from its quarries and gravel pits, equivalent to the output of 32 medium-sized quarries.
• bituminous asphalt mixes: bitumen is derived from petroleum and is becoming a rather rare commodity as refineries tend to favor other types of products. For this reason, the recovery of bitumen from worn road pavement surfaces is particularly expedient. In 2011, Colas used an average of 12% recycled asphalt mixes in its worldwide asphalt mix production, thus recovering about 230,000 tonnes of bitumen, equivalent to the annual bitumen yield of a medium-sized refinery, and nearly 5 million tonnes of aggregates (see above).
• on-site recycling: the on-site recycling of pavement is an especially interesting technique used to limit purchases of materials and reduce transport costs (and thus our carbon footprint). More than 8.6 million sq.m of pavement were recycled on site in 2011, for the most part in West Africa, North America, Central Europe, France, New Caledonia and the United Kingdom, thanks to a range of techniques ideally suited to areas subject to light or moderately heavy traffic (NOVA, Valorcol®, Recycold®, etc.).