Sustainability by Benninghoven

Reuse of asphalt

Benninghoven has decades of experience with recycling reclaimed asphalt. Reusing reclaimed asphalt, for example from road resurfacing, reduces the need for primary raw materials like virgin mineral to significantly lower material costs. In addition, reclaimed asphalt already contains bitumen, which is also reused and therefore avoids the costs for the most expensive ingredient in asphalt production.

Benninghoven offers several cold and hot recycling feed systems – including its leading recycling technology, the Benninghoven hot gas generator, which permits RAP feed rates of up to 100% while keeping emissions low. The Benninghoven REVOC system is a patented innovation that was presented by Benninghoven at the Bauma 2022 exhibition for the first time. The new Retrofit solution offers an upgrade path for existing asphalt mixing plants equipped with one or more recycling systems and significantly reduces total carbon concentrations in exhaust gases. This also makes REVOC an important contribution to securing the future the plant site.

Production of warm-mix asphalt

The drying and heating processes for virgin mineral and RAP material are particularly energy-intensive in asphalt production. Fuel and emissions can be saved if authorities and owners prioritize reduced-temperature asphalt types. This refers to asphaltic mixtures with a final temperature of around 120 °C. This equates to a 30 % reduction in contrast to conventional mixtures, which usually require a temperature of around 160 °C. However, the potential savings in terms of energy and CO₂ are far greater:18,000 kWh and 6,000 kg of CO₂ are saved in the production of 2,000 t of asphalt – on a daily basis.

Benninghoven asphalt mixing plants use a reliable process to produce high-quality reduced-temperature asphalt. One important part of this process is the use of a foam bitumen module, which Benninghoven also offers as a Retrofit “Plug & Work” solution. Foam bitumen is interesting because this binder requires only one auxiliary material for producing reduced-temperature asphalt: water, which is already available at any asphalt mixing plant anyway. Mixing hot bitumen with water multiplies the volume many times, which is why this process is also referred to as “foaming” the bitumen. The released surface energy ensures that the binder moistens the mineral very well during the mixing process even at low temperatures, temporarily generating installation properties that are comparable to those of hot asphalt.

Using renewable energies

With the latest MULTI JET burner generation, Benninghoven offers a pioneering solution for using different fuels in asphalt production.

The burner system enables the use of a wide range of energy sources, from fossil fuels such as coal and oil or renewable fuels such as biomass-to-liquid (BtL) and wood to 100% hydrogen.

Benninghoven is already able today to use green hydrogen as a fuel for drying and heating materials. Changing the fuel to hydrogen alone can result in 38% lower CO₂ emissions – and that is without the use of RAP material.
Source: https://www.wirtgen-group.com/de-de/unternehmen/wirtgen-group/nachhaltigkeit/emissionen-reduzieren/

In addition to this, our state-of-the-art burner test rig allows us to optimise even custom fuels in terms of their burning and emissions characteristics.