Sustainable Concrete
The leading material in Sustainable Construction

The UK Government announced in the March 2000 Budget that an aggregates tax of £1.60 per tonne would be introduced in April 2002. The Chancellor of the Exchequer announced in his Budget of March 2007 that the Aggregates Levy will rise to £1.95 per tonne from April 2008, amounting to an increased tax burden of between £70m and £80m ¹.

 

The tax applies to crushed rock and sand and gravel extracted or dredged in the UK for aggregates use. Aggregates exports are not taxed, but imports of aggregates are taxed at the first point of sale in the UK. Imports of products manufactured with aggregates, such as concrete blocks, are also not taxed.

 

The Waste & Resource Action Programme (WRAP) is entirely funded through the Aggregates Levy Sustainability Fund, and, since its inception, it has invested over £10 million in total with £2.2 million in reprocessing infrastructure. This investment will secure the supply of almost one million extra tonnes of recycled and secondary aggregates. Having secured continuing funding from DEFRA and the Scottish Executive, WRAP has now set its sights on delivering a 10% increase in the use of non-primary aggregates in higher-value applications such as the manufacture of concrete ².

 

Concrete is a recyclable material. Most people do not stop to think of what happens to the rubble when a structure is demolished, apart from assuming it all goes to landfill. But in fact anything up to 95% of a building's components can be recycled, including the most heavily reinforced concrete ¹.