With the goal of reducing the amount of inert waste created, FCC Construcción looked at the possibility of using a sandwich of surfaces made of cement mix and hot bituminous mixture.

The cement mix was made by recycling old road surface with cement in a wet process in the areas where the new road ran on top of the old road, and by recycling selected materials in the areas where the new road departed from the old route.

After a preliminary series of test bores to ascertain the precise thickness and characteristics of the road surface, we built a test section to check the results of our working formula. Then we found the amount of cement that would be needed to ensure suffi cient strength in the cement layer using recycled materials. The results of this preliminary work revealed the need for a granulometric correcting substance to obtain cement mix in the required parameter range.

Road surface recycling minimizes environmental impact, because it reduces the volume of waste that has to be disposed of in a landfi ll and uses the material already on the road site to make cement mix with the right aspects and bearing capacity for use as the base layer of the new road surface.

Altogether, a major amount of resources was saved that otherwise would have had to be quarried from the natural environment, with all the environmental, social and economic costs that this would have entailed.