Welcome to Quarryville

One way of reducing industrial wastes – the BIG version of your leftovers - is to use them to make other products.

Here at Quarryville our motto is “waste not, want not” – that is because we have yet to discover the ‘leftover’ rock, stone or aggregate that was not useful in one way or another.

Lots of aggregates (crushed rocks and stone) are used for building work. Building work results in large amounts of waste for lots of different reasons - poor storage, bad handling, over-buying. Around 10% of bricks delivered to building sites are wasted!

Construction and demolition waste is expensive to transport to disposal sites or landfills. But if it is crushed and processed, it can be reused as an aggregate for road building and other projects.

At Quarryville, we use waste products from highway construction and maintenance to make materials for pathways – so bits of aggregate that were originally destined for a motorway, end up as part of a pathway in a country park.

Recycled materials can be used for road bases, car parks and playgrounds, as well. We also produce organic (natural) compost. Gardeners use compost to help their plants grow and to fight weeds and disease.

Recycled does not mean poor quality. Quarryville has a special ‘quality control’ laboratory to make sure that recycled aggregates are of the highest quality.

Recycling aggregates is not only good for business, it is also good for the environment. And nature does need a helping hand sometimes.

Decomposers

Fact: Sooner or later, all living things die.

Fact: Living things are made from chemicals which are borrowed from the earth.

Fact: At death, these chemicals are returned to the earth.

Fact: All the material that every animal - from the smallest fly to the biggest elephant - takes in as food also returns to the earth as waste matter.

The dead material and waste matter form the diet of a group of living organisms called decomposers. They include bacteria, fungi and small animals (worms, woodlice, etc.) that break down nature’s wastes into ever smaller pieces until all the chemicals are released into the air, the soil, and the water, making them available to other living things.

Fact: Without the carbon dioxide that decomposition releases all plant life would die out.

Fact: Without the oxygen that plants give out, and without the food they supply, all animals would gradually starve. The decomposers are a vital link in the natural cycle of life and death.

Fact that human beings should be taking far more seriously: Many man-made chemicals, including plastics and some metals, cannot be broken down by nature’s decomposers. They hang around in the environment, permanently storing all the natural resources that went to make them.

Government studies in Britain show that 50% of solid waste is made of recyclable materials, yet only 5% of household waste is recycled.