North Lanarkshire Council: UK Centre of Excellence for Decarbonising Roads – North Campus

Theme:

A UK centre of excellence for materials.

Local authorities:

North Lanarkshire Council.

Overview:

Road maintenance within local authorities (LAs) is one of the biggest contributors to CO2 emissions, which are harmful to our planet. The CEDR project aims to find, trial and select the lowest carbon material to use in every aspect of road maintenance and create a database tool that LAs across the country can use to reduce their carbon footprint and aid our collaborative journey towards net-zero.

Project description:

The construction, renewal, adaptation, and maintenance of the UK’s local roads assets make a significant and ongoing contribution to our greenhouse gas emissions, climate change impacts and future resilience. Materials are at the heart of everything we do and embodied carbon in materials represents 40% of the total carbon yield in roads, with additional carbon from scopes 2 and 3 significantly adding to the whole life carbon cost of the materials on our roads.

Despite rapid advancements in materials and manufacturing, efforts in the UK remain disparate and isolated. This dramatically limits value for the taxpayer, and scalability, with individual councils tasked with evaluating unproven methods and balancing upfront investments with payoffs in resilience and decarbonisation. This Live-Lab presents two core elements in response: (1) A UK Centre of Excellence for materials decarbonisation in local roads, comprising standards, knowledge management, a cloud database, global network, and systematic measurement and, (2) A materials testing programme identifying and deploying the top global innovation on UK roads.

The Centre of Excellence for Materials Decarbonisation will identify, develop, demonstrate, showcase, monitor and scale the leading ideas in Material Decarbonisation for the UK local authority sector. This programme of works will focus on delivering an industry recognised and trusted evaluation framework and convening of global networks. Academic partners such as Connected Place Catapult, Transport Scotland and the Manufacturing Technology Centre will help accelerate the adoption of material innovation across the sector.

Project value:

£4.5m.