Recycled aggregate certification · Sydney, Australia

The road won't settle. Now you can prove it.

Australia throws away millions of tonnes of construction rubble strong enough to build roads with. It goes to cheap fill instead — not because the material fails, but because nobody hands the engineer a number they can design with. CycloPave is building that number.

Nariman Khorsandiardebili Founder Pavement geomechanics — how the material behaves in the road

Marzieh Dehghan Niri Co-founder Circular economy — why the industry adopts it, and what moves them

See how it works Talk to us

We shed light on it

The material was never missing.
Only the evidence was.

29.2Mt Construction and demolition waste produced each year

23.6Mt Already recovered — 84% of it

5.6Mt Still going to landfill

Recovery is solved. The destination is not. Most of what we recover is sold as low-value fill instead of going into the structural layers of a road. DCCEEW 2024 ↗

Under the wheel

The road remembers every wheel.

Every pass drives stress down into the base and subbase, and the aggregate springs back — almost. What does not spring back is the rut. Predict that, and the road can be built from recycled material.

The problem

Good material, thrown away for want of a number.

Australia produces about 29.2 million tonnes of construction and demolition waste each year and already recovers 23.6 million tonnes of it. A large share is structurally sound enough for the base and subbase of a road.

Most of it never gets there. It is sold as low-value fill, while the road above is built from virgin rock blasted out of a quarry.

The reason is not the material. It is risk. A designer who specifies recycled aggregate carries the liability if the pavement ruts, and the standard tests describe what the material is, not how it will behave under twenty years of traffic. Faced with that gap, every rational engineer defaults to virgin rock.

Road pavement cross-section: asphalt surface course, base and subbase of crushed aggregate, and the earth subgrade beneath. — CycloPave certifies the base and subbase — the two layers that carry the traffic load.

01
Quarried.

Every tonne left out is a tonne of virgin rock dug and freighted in its place.
02
Twentyfold.

Lower resource depletion than virgin aggregate.
03
Fifteen kilometres.

Producing a tonne of aggregate emits about 3–7 kg CO₂e. Trucking it adds roughly 0.1 kg per tonne-kilometre — so distance, not the material, decides the carbon. Our yards are inside Sydney; the quarry is hours away.
04
Nothing.

What a designer has today to prove how a stockpile will behave. That is the gap.

Aggregate production: Boral Quarries & Recycling EPD (EPD Australasia, 2024) — cradle-to-gate A1–A3, 2.9–7.2 kg CO₂e per tonne across sites. The declaration reports quarried and recycled products together; haulage factor is indicative.

How it works

We sit between the recycler and the road.

Rubble already flows from demolition sites to recycling yards. What is missing is the step that lets it cross into structural pavement with confidence.

Step one

Demolition

Concrete, brick and reinforced slabs come off site as mixed rubble.

A crusher discharging aggregate onto a stockpile

Step two

Recycling

Yards crush and grade it into stockpiles — around ten thousand tonnes per lot.

This is us

Certification

We model the stockpile's behaviour and issue a certificate a designer can build on.

A roller compacting crushed rock base course

Step four

Pavement

The material goes into the base and subbase with predicted performance, not guesswork.

The engine

A model that answers the only question that matters.

Give us a stockpile and we tell you how it will behave in a road — how stiff it is, and how much it will rut over the life of the pavement — with the variability of the whole lot carried into the answer rather than averaged away.

How we do it is ours. What you get is a number you can design with.

CycloPave engine Method sealed

Beyond the standard suiteA laboratory programme that goes well past the certificates a supplier already hands you.

Grain scale to road scaleHow individual particles carry and shed load — and what that means for a whole layer.

Millions of load cyclesBehaviour under repeated traffic, not a single number from a single push.

Across the entire lotVariability inside a ten-thousand-tonne stockpile, measured and carried into the answer.

Recognition

1 of 9 national finalists

ClimateLaunchpad Australia 2026 · National Final, Sydney

CycloPave was selected as one of the nine national finalists of the world's largest green business idea competition.

Out of every entry across the country. We pitched on the National Final stage on 23 July 2026. See the finalist list ↗

$10,000 — NSW Decarbonisation Innovation Hub

Awarded under the PhD Top-Up Grants to Advance Low-Emission Innovation — 21 grants totalling $210,000, funded by the NSW Government through the Office of the Chief Scientist & Engineer and the NSW Environmental Trust. Programme ↗

Interview guaranteed — EnergyLab Climate Tech Charge

EnergyLab, Australia's largest climate-tech accelerator, sat on the ClimateLaunchpad Australia National Final jury and undertook to give every finalist an interview for its Climate Tech Charge programme. Our application is in. Programme ↗

Who we are

Two disciplines, one gap.

The mechanics that prove the material, and the market knowledge that gets it specified. Neither works alone.

Nariman Khorsandiardebili

Founder

Pavement geomechanics. How recycled granular materials carry, break and deform under traffic.

LinkedIn Google Scholar UTS SmartCrete CRC

Marzieh Dehghan Niri

Co-founder

Circular economy. Why industry adopts recycled materials, and what actually moves them.

LinkedIn Google Scholar UTS