Paving the MRC of Arthabaska with reused materials is Bituméco’s ambition. Opened in 2018, the plant will begin testing its coating made of recycled glass and asphalt on the streets of Victoriaville this summer.
“Bitumeco’s only raison d’être is to recycle material,” explains Claude Charland, president of the company, in an interview with La Presse.
Five years after the opening of its factory in Saint-Rosaire, the company is preparing to test its special coating on three sections of street in Victoriaville.
Bituméco recovers the glass collected, sorted and granulated by Gaudreau Environnement Victoriaville, a company that manages the municipality’s residual materials.
Typically, asphalt is made of aggregate (often sand or gravel) bound with petroleum. At Bituméco, granulated recycled glass is used as aggregate.
“It’s in projects to integrate other materials,” adds Claude Charland, who is considering adding recycled plastic, rubber and asphalt to Bituméco’s coating recipe.
Making asphalt with residual materials is already done elsewhere in the world, recognizes Claude Charland, but Bituméco is first and foremost a circular economy project.
The idea of Bituméco was born in 2017 with Daniel Gaudreau, owner of Gaudreau Environnement Victoriaville, a waste management company.
“Daniel said to himself, ‘It doesn’t make sense that we don’t reuse our waste materials of glass, plastic, petroleum. […] Why don’t we do it at home?” “says Claude Charland.
Daniel Gaudreau, who died in 2017, chose to work with Marchand Excavation, which then operated an asphalt plant in northern Quebec. “Marchand Excavation took down his asphalt plant in Victoriaville, and we founded Bitumeco,” says Claude Charland, who was then CEO of Gaudreau Environnement.
Today, the company works with Solmatech laboratories to test its recipes.
Bituméco was ready to launch its project as early as 2018, but one thing was missing: the political will. The strict regulations of the Ministry of Transport made it “little or not possible” to use glass on Quebec roads, explains Claude Charland.
Bituméco was supposed to pour its first sections of street in Victoriaville the week of July 16, but the tornado warning forced the company to postpone the work until the beginning of August.
Claude Charland is hopeful that this pilot project will bear fruit. The results seem convincing: for three years, the land around the Bituméco plant has been covered with a coating made of glass. “It responds very well, even under the weight of the heavy trucks that pass over it every day,” says the president.
Bitumeco does not intend to stop there. “Other municipalities have knocked on our door,” says Claude Charland, who hopes to one day serve the entire MRC of Arthabaska thanks to the plant’s central location in the region.
