British Recycled Products looks at the benefits of Plastic Waste
When British Recycled Products launched their range of recycled landscaping and construction materials people talked about how inventive a use of our household and industrial waste it was.
Now the company has become a watchword for environmentally friendly, socially responsible business and you are as likely to find their products in National Trust woodland, as you are a major supermarket, government agency or village municipal space.
But when the Ministry of Defence used the company’s innovative Hebden 40™ for the 12,000m2 car park at Leconfield Barracks in East Yorkshire, it wasn’t just the product’s eco-credentials which convinced them. The Royal Logistics Corps at Leconfield train the drivers of the British Armed Forces, meaning that Hebden 40™ had to be durable and strong enough to for what is essentially the biggest driving school in Europe, as well as being able to alleviate more than 6 million litres a year of rainwater run-off.*
Plastic waste diverted from Britain’s landfill sites, is recycled to create Hebden 40™: a simple cellular structure, easily fitted and filled with gravel or grass seed, creating a car park surface tough enough to serve the military.
Light and easy to install, it allows rainwater to permeate back into the natural ecosystem, in a way that almost all other driveway and car park surfaces of comparable strength can’t. By returning rainfall naturally to the water table, the risk of flash flooding is alleviated. There is none of the run off into already stressed, and often antiquated, drainage systems which results from conventional asphalt developments.
Not only are these unremarkable looking lattices of recycled plastic are simple enough to use to expand the car parking in domestic housing, without losing any green space, but they have turned the creation of ground surfaces durable and strong enough to carry vehicles into an opportunity to contribute to flood prevention.
“In the light of the devastation wreaked by sudden and intense rainfall in the last few years, a scenario forecast by most meteorologists to increase, as a society, we have had to start asking questions about how much impact new developments have on the way water is distributed. Could we reduce the risk of flooding caused by vast areas of impermeable paving, and the misery it brings with it?” asks British Recycled Products Managing Director, Jason Elliott.
With their Hebden 40™, British Recycled Products have given us a solution, which means that something destined to do so much environmental damage by being landfilled, could now be the raw material for one of the keys to preventing floods in future.
The company is less than three years old, and already works with government agencies across the spectrum, civil engineering firms, major supermarkets, and local authorities around the country. More and more, enlightened planners and architects around the country are switching to this environmentally friendly solution, and it seems like that the days of car parks being an automatic trigger for petitions and protest songs are numbered.
*Based on an average annual rainfall of 512mm
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Notes for Editors
Stephen Morris, Communications Manager of British Recycled Products, can be contacted on 01422 844 716. More information about the Hebden 40&trade, and the company as a whole, can be found at http://britishrecycledproducts.co.uk