Certainty of highway materials supply has been boosted on the Isle of Wight with the opening of a state of the art asphalt plant.

The £3.5M facility was officially opened by local MP Andrew Turner on Friday and is capable of twice the hourly throughput of a former asphalt plant on site.

The new plant at St George’s Down in the centre of the island is run by Wight Building Materials, a joint venture of Aggregate Industries and Eurovia.

Much of the asphalt produced at the new plant will be supplied to Island Roads, the PFI contractor with a 25 year contract to improve and maintain highway condition on the Isle of Wight. The low emission, energy efficient plant will also serve local utility contractors and developers.

“This new asphalt plant has more than double the capacity of the old plant, so we can boost production and allow Island Roads to catch up on delays to surfacing works during the first year of its PFI,” said Wight Building Materials chairman Simon Willis. “The plant also has a recycling facility to reduce the consumption of primary aggregates.”

Every hour the plant will be capable of producing up to 160t of asphalt. Planings extracted from roads on the island will be recycled at the new plant, which can produce hot new base and binder course materials containing up to 20% secondary aggregate by volume.

Tar bound material removed from existing roads will be processed cold in a separate plant nearby using special foamed bitumen and specified in the lower layers of a highway at appropriate locations.

To return to the newsletter, please close this window.