An £8.5m Government-funded research project into building and maintaining roads with low-carbon and recycled materials is now open for submissions.
The Centre of Excellence for Decarbonising Roads, part of the ADEPT Live Labs 2 programme, is looking for innovators to come forward with materials and designs.
The Centre will focus on creating an industry-trusted process for the identification, evaluation, trialling and sharing of groundbreaking low-carbon materials for road construction and maintenance.
Its website is now live and open to innovators with new low carbon road materials to submit for trial and evaluation. Successful submissions could get support to scale up.
The website will also provide information on the background to the project, live trials and regular blogs.
The project is split into a North and South campus, with a collaboration between North Lanarkshire Council and Amey in the North, and Transport for West Midlands (TfWM) and partner Colas Ltd in the South.
Kenneth Stevenson, convener of the communities committee and Live Labs 2 champion at North Lanarkshire Council, said: ‘The Centre of Excellence for Decarbonising Roads is driving forward innovative solutions to reduce carbon emissions on the UK roads network, and the new website will help identify ideas and materials to test and develop for the future.
‘We will bring together business, academic and public sector partners in a centralised hub to trial and evaluate new materials and share the learning to support the move to carbon net zero.'
Mark Corbin, director of network resilience at TfWM, said: ‘These innovations could make our roads more efficient to build and maintain.’
The Centre of Excellence is already reviewing ideas and innovations but is seeking further contributions from innovators, researchers, local authorities and beyond.
Live Labs 2: Decarbonising Local Roads in the UK is a three-year, UK-wide £30m programme funded by the Department for Transport that aims to decarbonise the local highway network.
It includes seven projects testing new solutions to decarbonise construction and maintenance on the local highway network, led by local authorities working alongside commercial and academic partners.
The programme is overseen by an independent commissioning board.
