Lafarge Cement promotes adoption of soil stabilisation
Part of Aggregate Industries, Lafarge Cement has stated that the wider adoption of soil stabilisation could be key to making road construction more cost-effective and sustainable. This comes after the UK’s recent Budget set out the country’s largest ever investment in the Strategic Road Network.
A core objective of the strategy is to create a ‘greener network’, bringing down maintenance costs and calling on Highways England and its supply chain partners to step up to the challenge through innovation and creativity.
According to Lafarge Cement, one way that the industry can achieve this is by taking a ‘ground-up’ approach that utilises soil stabilisation by using hydraulic road binders. This is a process that is widely used in the US and across Europe to improve weak in-situ materials for foundations in road engineering.
Lafarge Cement last year launched TerraCem. This is the UK’s first hydraulic binder that is specially formulated for soil stabilisation. It is designed to strengthen existing onsite material without the need to import aggregates. TerraCem has been specifically engineered to improve silos, strengthen weak substructure layers to create a working platform, and offer reduced embodied carbon in comparison to traditional cement stabilisation.
“The key to successfully building a world-class sustainable road network will be adopting innovative ways of working,” said Steve Curley, Commercial Director at Lafarge Cement.
“This often starts with ground engineering, where for years the issue of weak in-situ materials has been solved by replacing them with imported natural aggregates – a costly method. More recently, soil stabilisation that blends in-situ materials with a rapidly hardening hydraulic road binder has been proven to remove the need for traditional sub base or base course aggregate, making it more environmentally friendly and cost effective.”
“With a greater onus on contractors to deliver the UK’s most ambitious road projects to date in the most sustainable and economical way possible, world-leading agencies, such as Highways England, Heathrow, and Associated British Ports, are already seeing the benefits of using hydraulically bound mixtures. Hence, the direction of travel is clear; best practice now dictates the use of specialist binders in the soil stabilisation as the ‘go to’ method for greener, leaner, and more efficient road construction.”https://www.worldcement.com/europe-cis/18022019/lafarge-cement-promotes-adoption-of-soil-stabilisation/
