UK Centre of Excellence for Decarbonising Roads - South Campus: progress on decarbonising roads and material innovations
Joseph Kimberley, Innovation Manager from Colas gives an update on the UK Centre of Excellence for Decarbonising Roads’ South Campus and how their Live Labs 2 project is progressing.
So far, the ADEPT Live Labs 2 programme has been exciting, challenging and a real adventure.
Our South Campus project team, comprising Transport for West Midlands and our delivery partner Colas, is keen to share our progress in discovering and evaluating opportunities for material decarbonisation.
As the Centre of Excellence for Decarbonising Roads, our mission is to identify, trial, evaluate and disseminate cutting edge low carbon materials across the UK and beyond. Empowering local authorities to embrace and deploy these solutions, making substantial reductions in the sector's carbon footprint.
The programme
Our project's first year was devoted to designing and building the programme with our colleagues at North Lanarkshire Council and their delivery partner Amey, establishing baselines and designing trial methodologies. We began by conducting carbon assessments of each of the local authorities from the West Midlands Combined Authorities (WMCA) local roads services to establish their baselines.
After this, we went on to deliver our first round of on-network demonstrators with a series of pothole repair trials. We took an outcome based approach to selecting a trial methodology and will be returning later in the year to perform the second round of trials with the same suppliers and will also be inviting further suppliers to take part.
We have already heard of multiple benefits being realised by our suppliers for being involved in the Live Labs 2 programme, which has been really encouraging.
Demonstrators
Operationally, the programme is progressing well and we are due to enter our second and third round of demonstrators for the year over the next two months. We are delivering a programme of asphalt preservation, looking at the solutions from four suppliers of asphalt rejuvenators and preservers. This will closely be followed by our second iteration of the pothole project. With refined methodologies we will look at other factors essential to the low carbon pothole repair questions and look at additional suppliers.
Our next steps for the surface treatments programme will be to look at surface dressing innovations, microasphalt innovations and the use of geotextile mesh grids - we plan to release more updates in this space in March. After this we will be going back to the ‘Solutions Hopper’, an initial collection data bank for all innovative solutions collected by CEDR so far, as we evaluate resurfacing solutions throughout 2025.
Innovation in the sector
The Centre of Excellence for Decarbonising Roads Solutions Hopper now proudly stands at 430 solutions. We are delighted by the quantity and quality of responses from the market, with suppliers submitting their solutions and engaging with our team. This collection point of potential solutions has gone on to now include submissions from a global audience and this further sourcing of material solutions has been supported by Connected Places Catapult. We are questioning how we can manage to look through such a plethora of exciting opportunities in a way that is fair to each supplier. This will be no mean feat and we welcome the support of the community in giving fair chances to the supply chain!
Looking further forward, we are supporting the North Campus in their development of a Knowledge Bank, a feature of our website http://www.decarbonisingroads.co.uk, as this will be the main touchpoint with the sector. This will be an interactive space to view the evaluations carried out and to connect with suppliers. This exciting new development will be available for first access later in the year.
Further information
- For more information on ADEPT Live Labs 2: Decarbonising Local Roads in the UK, please look at the Live Labs 2 section on the website
- For more information about the UK Centre of Excellence for Decarbonising Roads, please visit the project website
Author
Joseph Kimberley, Innovation Manager at Colas
