It’s not enough to build better infrastructure for a community. To do the right thing is to also ensure the wellbeing and safety of its members as tonne after tonne of asphalt is being churned out from industrial plants and road after road is being paved. Our responsibility in civil engineering is to truly make these communities more sustainable as we change them.
In asphalt production and services, safety and wellbeing must be ensured from the very first steps to the final product – from workers and the communities living in close proximities to asphalt plants, to the public using the roads we pave.
We maintain rigorous standards of training in health and safety practice for all staff. We also adopted the NSW Roads and Maritime Services’ Worker on Foot program as industry best practice, and are open to innovations which promote employee’s safety. Our priority is that our staff return to their families safe and sound at the end of every working day.
As an innovator in sustainable civil engineering, we are keen to follow global trends with hopes to adopt these technologies in the future – for instance, porous paving as a means to reduce urban run-off. Once paved with a certain type of porous asphalt, roads across neighbourhoods become more harmonious with natural process, letting rain and stormwater percolate through layers of filtering materials – porous pavers, sand or gravel, coarse gravel – to finally infiltrate the layer of soil underneath.
This helps re-establish a more natural hydrologic balance, and lessen the load for the stormwater system by gradually releasing rainwater instead of allowing it to flow freely in large “chunks” into the system. Although this type of asphalt can only support light traffic loads, the result still performs excellently in preventing flash floods and site run-off near factories, commonly caused by impermeable concrete paving.
Asphalt profiling provide roads – especially highways – with better traction and skid resistance for vehicles travelling at high speed, also thanks to the introduction of porous asphalt paving which keeps water from pooling on road surfaces. These asphalt roads are also quieter – with quiet pavement technologies like two-layer open-graded pavements, noise reduction is reported to be reduced by 3 to 10 decibels, the equivalence of reducing traffic volume by half.
To build better roads is just the starting point – we strive to build safer, quieter, and more sustainable facilities for our communities.
