C&D WASTE CRUSHED GRADED CERTIFIED BASE

0+000 0+100 0+200 0+300 0+400 0+500 0+600 0+700 0+800 0+900 1+000 1+100 1+200 1+300 1+400 1+500 1+600

Recycled aggregate certification · Sydney, Australia

The road is already in the rubble.
All that's missing is the proof.

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

01The material

The material was never missing.
Only the evidence was.

26.8Mt Building & demolition waste generated each year

22.4Mt Recovered already — 84% of it

4.4Mt Still going to landfill

Construction & demolition waste generated in Australia Million tonnes a year · the stream grew 24% in six years

Show the figures

Year	Mt generated
2016–17	23.55
2017–18	26.33
2018–19	27.05
2019–20	27.41
2020–21	28.79
2021–22	28.01
2022–23	29.23

Recovery is solved. Confidence is not. The department itself reports good markets for recycled concrete aggregate in road base, aggregates and hardstand. What none of that tells a designer is how one particular stockpile will behave under twenty years of traffic — and that is the number we make. DCCEEW 2024 ↗

02The carbon

The carbon was never in the crushing.
It was in the digging.

3.5kg CO₂e to produce one tonne of recycled road base

2.9–9.9kg The same figure across fourteen quarry sites

1,000kg Secondary material in every tonne — rock never quarried

The saving was never a cleaner crusher. At the gate, making recycled road base and making quarried rock cost about the same — recycled simply sits at the low end of the quarry range. What changes is everything the gate does not measure: the extraction that never happens, the landfill void that stays empty, and the kilometres never driven — because the yards are inside the city and the quarry is not. ResourceCo EPD 2024 ↗ Boral EPD 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, held back for want of a number.

Australia generates about 26.8 million tonnes of building and demolition waste a year — concrete, brick and rubble — and already recovers 22.4 million tonnes, or 84% of it.

So the shortage was never supply, and it is not demand either: the department reports good markets for recycled concrete aggregate in road base, aggregates and hardstand. The open question is which layer the material is trusted to enter, and how much of the traffic load it is allowed to carry.

That is a question about risk, not about rock. 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
All of it.

A tonne of recycled base carries 1,000 kg of secondary material — the declaration's own figure. Every tonne laid is a tonne of rock never quarried.
03
Three and a half.

Kilograms of CO₂e to produce a tonne of recycled road base. Across fourteen quarry sites the same figure runs 2.9 to 9.9 kg — so recycled already sits at the low end of virgin rock, before a kilometre is driven. 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.

Recycled road base: ResourceCo Wingfield EPD (EPD-IES-0013385:001, EPD Australasia 2024) — GWP-total 3.51 kg CO₂e and 1,000 kg secondary material per tonne, modules A1–A3. Quarried aggregate: Boral Quarries & Recycling EPD (EPD Australasia 2024) — GWP-GHG 2.9–9.9 kg CO₂e per tonne across fourteen Victorian sites, A1–A3. Both are cradle-to-gate: haulage sits outside the declared boundary of each, so the two are compared at the gate only.

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

National Final · Sydney · 23 July 2026

ClimateLaunchpad Australia 2026 · National Final, Sydney

CycloPave was selected as one of the nine national finalists of ClimateLaunchpad Australia 2026 — 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 ↗

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

PhD Candidate, Transportation GeotechnicsUniversity of Technology Sydney

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

LinkedIn Google Scholar UTS SmartCrete CRC

Marzieh Dehghan Niri

Co-founder

PhD Candidate, Industrial Symbiosis & Circular EconomyUniversity of Technology Sydney

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

LinkedIn Google Scholar UTS

The road is already in the rubble.All that's missing is the proof.

The material was never missing.Only the evidence was.

The carbon was never in the crushing.It was in the digging.