Plastic roads firm MacRebur officially opened their new headquarters at the town’s Broomhouses Industrial Estate on Tuesday. It incorporates a factory which processes waste plastic into granules which are then used as a binder in road construction, replacing some of the bitumen.
The company’s plastic roads are already down in the Middle East, America, Turkey, Slovakia, Australia and New Zealand. Closer to home, Dumfries and Galloway Council have laid trial roads in this region and Cumbria County Council have just been awarded a £1.6 million government grant to roll out more plastic roads in their area.
MacRebur co-founder Gordon Reid said: “Due to rapid expansion over the past year, we quickly outgrew our original base in Waterbeck. We’re delighted with our new Lockerbie factory and it’s great to have increased our workforce to 11 – and we have another employee starting soon. “There’s a huge amount of interest nationally and internationally in what we’re doing and in the next few months we’re heading out to South Africa, Norway, Switzerland and Greece and will also be opening two more of our factories in Eastern Europe. The Department For Transport Cumbrian grant is an exciting domestic opportunity for us and in addition, we’ve been delighted that leading UK firms, like Tesco, KFC and the Gleneagles Hotel, have used our products at some of their UK sites.”
At this week’s launch event, guests from local authorities around Scotland and England, as well as asphalt producers, got the chance to find out more about the firm’s innovations. Guest speaker was Dr Greg White, of the University of the Sunshine Coast in Australia, who has written several academic papers on the product and was last week speaking about it at the International Conference on Asphalt in Liverpool.
Gordon added: “I’ve been working closely with Dr White over the last year here, in Europe and in Australia and we have carried out extensive testing of our products in different conditions and climates. Furthermore, we have roads which have now been in situ for two years in the UK and abroad and are performing strongly against traditional methods.”
Meanwhile, MacRebur’s factory was recently filmed by the Discovery Channel for their How Things Work show and it will feature in an episode later this year.
