Bio bicycle path, by Sweco, Netherlands.
The U.K. Green Party has launched its 2019 manifesto. The 92-page If Not Now, When? sets out the polices the party would introduce should it win the December General Election. The party pledges to spend an extra £141.5 billion a year as part of its Green New Deal to bring carbon emissions to net zero by 2030.
On transport, the party pledges to scrap the High Speed 2 rail line and use the money for smaller-scale transport projects instead. Speed limits for motorists would be reduced, and there would be new taxes on petrol, diesel, shipping and aviation fuel.
The Green Party also pledged to spend £2.5 billion a year on woodchip and sawdust cycleways and footpaths. This has been much ridiculed on social media by advocates of active-travel, who say such surface treatments quickly degrade and become impassable.
If Not Now, When? is light on detail, but it’s probable that the idea for woodchip and sawdust surfaces is based on trials carried out in The Netherlands.
The Dutch city of Emmen installed a cycleway made out of recycled wood in 2017. Paving slabs were formed from wood chips held in place by organic resin.
Grontmij, the transport consultancy behind the project, used waste product from sawmills. The wood and resin surfacing is expected to have a working life at least as long as asphalt, believes the company.
Grontmij’s Rudi van Hedel told Dutch magazine Cobouw that the wood-and-resin slabs are far greener than other materials:
“The biocomposite materials [we use] are less damaging to the environment to produce. They’re green resources so they contribute to a bio-based economy.”
The first 200-meter stretch of experimental cycleway was laid by construction company Sweco in July 2017.
The trial section is made up of six parts, each with a different composition and top layer. The results of the test will be revealed later this year.
The Netherlands is at the forefront of trialling eco cycleways. In 2016 the city of Leeuwarden made a cycleway made from (very) recycled toilet paper. And, in Amsterdam, there’s a cycleway constructed from waste glass and elephant grass.
While the Dutch may be ahead of the game on cycleways the use of wood-derived products in British infrastructure projects is nothing new: the M6 Toll motorway was built with pulped fiction. Two-and-a-half million Mills and Boon novels were used in the construction of the road, reported the BBC in 2003.
