Good points for Flanders for materials management in the construction sector
On 31 March, the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) published its Environmental Performance Review for our country. It shows that Flanders received particularly good marks for its waste and materials management. With more than 95% of the construction and demolition waste being recycled, Flanders belongs to the top in Europe.
Through certification, COPRO has been ensuring for more than 35 years that pure debris, which is released in the demolition or renovation of buildings or in the breaking up of roads, can be processed into high-quality recycled aggregates.
An important factor in the further development of construction and demolition waste is that hazardous substances such as asbestos and tar do not enter the circuit and can be removed in a targeted way. Use in low-grade applications such as in foundations or as filling material should also be limited as much as possible. More and more efforts are being made to find high-quality applications that make optimum use of the technical properties of the materials. In this way, the cycle of materials is gradually closed, and the use of primary minerals is reduced. An example of this is concrete granulate that is no longer used in (sub)foundations, but in the same application from which it came, namely concrete applications.
To realise this, COPRO is doing its bit to increase the quality assurance and traceability of recycled aggregates, in order to gain the confidence of the market.
There is still a lot of margin for improvement towards high-quality recycling applications, but as always, it is the ambition of COPRO to search, together with the recycling sector, for application possibilities of recycled aggregates with the highest possible added value.
