Seems it's easy being green

From Ford with the four-cylinder Falcon to the V8 Supercar grid, which is now converted to E85 ethanol fuel, everyone is looking for a fuel-efficient answer to the challenge of the 21st century.

No-one expected roads to also go green, but that was before the team at Swinburne University swung into action. The development team at the university's Centre for Sustainable Infrastructure has come up with a recipe for roads which are more environmentally friendly. And it all comes down to bricks.

No, Swinburne is not proposing a yellow brick road, or even the sort of brick paving which put the Indianapolis 500 on the road, but a way to incorporate more recycled brick into road pavement without hurting the strength of the end product.

Swinburne has found a way to increase the brick content and, in a partnership with VicRoads, some new roads are going to have as much as 15 per cent of crushed brick in their makeup.

That is because road pavements are primarily made up of crushed concrete and rock. And the Swinburne work has proved it is fine to switch to recycled crushed brick, instead of the current specification which only allows up to three per centre of 'foreign' material - brick, glass or metal - in a road.

Swinburne's lead researcher, Dr Arul Arulrajah, says the VicRoads change means a lot of the 500,000 tonnes of bricks that go into Victorian landfill each year could be re-directed to roads. "It would be great to increase our use of materials that would otherwise be dumped," he says.

VicRoads will now trial the new specification, although we should no expect to see a network of greener new freeways. It is starting with low-volume roads, such as freeway access roads, including new roads and ones which it is rehabilitating.

VicRoads is hopeful that the greener roads program will be widely implemented in coming years and the specification will also spread throughout Australia.

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