Waste is an inherent part of conducting construction activity and most of them is not suitable for reuse. Such waste is constituted by a bituminous mass, i.e. a mixture of aggregates, binders and fillers, resulting from the processing of crude oil, which is non-renewable. It is alike in the case of cement, concrete, lime powder and many other aggregates, which are formed as the products of non-renewable raw materials. However, there are materials that will come in useful again. At the demolition of buildings, there may be used, among others, metal, wood, glass, rubble or breakstone. In 2018, we planned an increase in reuse of waste materials generated on construction sites by 80%. Only those materials that find no useful application on the given construction site, particularly hazardous materials, are classified as waste. The exact amount of waste depends on a number of contracts and their specification.
Raw materials and materials the most frequently used by the Budimex Group include plain and modified road asphalt, cement, concrete, steel, hydraulic binders, lime dust, asphalt aggregate (including sand and grit), construction aggregate (sand, gravel), road aggregate (sand, grit, etc.), hydro-technical stone and railway breakstone. Reuse concerns gravel, spoil, cement, crushed-stone aggregate for bituminous mass, mixes of crushed-stone aggregates, concrete, steel, timber.
Effective management of a demand for materials and resources and their recycling in the Budimex Group are possible thanks to the VE (value engineering) – a system of monitoring of their use, applied to optimise the use of materials and limit the amount of produced waste. VE allows also to reduce costs, which is a very good example of an activity aimed at reduction of the adverse environmental impact of the investment, while obtaining business benefits.
In addition, we reused 1,706.51 thousand tonnes of soil and earth, 44.32 thousand tonnes of rubble, 64.77 thousand tonnes of crushed asphalt and 39.24 thousand tonnes of railway breakstone. In turn, use of materials from waste generated by other industries (e.g. mining, steelworks, power engineering), i.e. last year – came in the last year to almost 6.03 thousand tonnes.