John Woodward

As a Demolition Consultant I speak to our clients regularly on how they can improve on the current high levels of recycling in England and the one subject that keeps cropping up is how they deal with crushed concrete that used to have artex containing asbestos on some of the surfaces.

In England the law says that the building can be demolished with the artex in place, as the content of asbestos is less than 0.01% of the total volume of material, but it cannot then be reused as hardcore as the Environmental Agency consider it to be contaminated material.

The only solution is then to cart this excellent material to landfill!

However! In Scotland the view from SEPA is that the material is acceptable to be reused as hardcore and, as such, none will go to landfill.

To sum up:-

In England crush it and then pay a fortune to move good material to landfill, whereas in Scotland crush it and use it with no material going to landfill. It is pretty obvious to me that Scotland has got this exactly right whereas South of the border the English have no idea what to do!

In recycling crushed material with minimal amounts of artex then Scotland is better than England, and that is hard for me, an Englishman, to accept.