Recycled aggregate certification · Sydney, Australia

The road won't settle. Now you can prove it.

Australia throws away millions of tonnes of construction rubble that is strong enough to build roads with. It goes to cheap fill instead — not because the material fails, but because no one gives the engineer a number they can design with. CycloPave is building that number.

Nariman Khorsandiardebili Founder Pavement geomechanics — how the material behaves in the road

Marzieh Dehghan Niri Co-founder Circular economy — why the industry adopts it, and what moves them

See how it works Talk to us

Of the 29.2 Mt generated each year

23.6Mt

recovered

80.8% recovered 5.6 Mt landfilled

Recovered — and still shut out of its best market.

Australia recovers 23.6 of the 29.2 million tonnes of construction and demolition waste it produces each year. Recovery is solved. The destination is not.

01
Quarried.

Every tonne left out is a tonne of virgin rock dug and freighted in its place.
02
Twentyfold.

Lower resource depletion than virgin aggregate.
03
Fifteen kilometres.

Past that haul the carbon advantage erodes. Our yards are inside Sydney; the quarry is hours away.
04
Nothing.

What a designer has today to prove how a stockpile will behave. That is the gap.

Nobody specifies it because nobody can prove it performs. That proof is CycloPave.

Circular economyEmbodied carbon Resource recoveryNet-zero infrastructure

Waste figures: Australian Government DCCEEW, National Waste and Resource Recovery Report 2024 (FY2022‑23). Life-cycle comparisons are transport-sensitive; figures are directional, not a certified LCA.

Under the wheel

The road remembers every wheel.

Every pass of a wheel drives stress down into the base and subbase, and the aggregate springs back — almost. What does not spring back is the rut. Predict that, and the road can be built from recycled material.

The problem

Good material, thrown away for want of a number.

Every year Australia produces about 29.2 million tonnes of construction and demolition waste, and already recovers 23.6 million tonnes of it — a national recovery rate of 84%. A large share of that recovered construction and demolition waste aggregate is structurally sound enough for the base and subbase of a road.

Most of it never gets there. It is sold as low-value fill, while the road above it is built from virgin rock blasted out of a quarry.

The reason is not the material. It is risk. A designer who specifies recycled aggregate carries the liability if the pavement ruts or settles, and the standard tests — grading, CBR, compaction — describe what the material is, not how it will behave under twenty years of traffic. Faced with that gap, every rational engineer defaults to virgin rock.

A real road pavement cross-section: asphalt surface course, base and subbase of crushed aggregate, and the earth subgrade beneath.

CycloPave certifies the base and subbase — the two layers that carry the traffic load.

29.2 MtConstruction and demolition waste produced in Australia, FY2022‑23

23.6 MtAlready recovered rather than landfilled

84%National recovery rate for building and demolition materials

10,000 tA single stockpile — the unit CycloPave certifies

How it works

We sit between the recycler and the road.

Rubble already flows from demolition sites to recycling yards. What is missing is the step that lets it cross into structural pavement with confidence.

A building being demolished, concrete slabs hanging from exposed reinforcement

Step one

Demolition

Concrete, brick and reinforced slabs come off construction and demolition sites as mixed rubble.

A mobile crusher discharging crushed aggregate onto a graded stockpile

Step two

Recycling

Yards crush and grade it into stockpiles — typically around ten thousand tonnes per lot.

A materials testing laboratory bench with sieves and a tray of recycled aggregate

This is us

Certification

We model the stockpile's behaviour and issue a certificate a designer can build on.

A vibratory roller compacting a layer of loose crushed rock base course

Step four

Pavement

The material goes into the base and subbase with predicted performance, not guesswork.

The engine

A model that answers the only question that matters.

Give us a stockpile and we tell you how it will behave in a road — how stiff it is, and how much it will rut over the life of the pavement — with the variability of the whole lot carried into the answer rather than averaged away.

How we do it is ours. What you get is a number you can design with.

Beyond the standard suiteA laboratory programme that goes well past the certificates a supplier already hands you

Grain scale to road scaleHow individual particles carry and shed load — and what that means for a whole layer

Millions of load cyclesBehaviour under repeated traffic, not a single number from a single push

Across the entire lotVariability inside a ten-thousand-tonne stockpile, measured and carried into the answer

Recognition

1of9 national finalists

ClimateLaunchpad Australia 2026 · National Final, Sydney

CycloPave was selected as one of the nine national finalists of the world’s largest green business idea competition.

Out of every entry across the country. We pitched on the National Final stage on 23 July 2026. See the finalist list ↗

$10,000 — NSW Decarbonisation Innovation Hub

Awarded under the PhD Top-Up Grants to Advance Low-Emission Innovation — 21 grants totalling $210,000, funded by the NSW Government through the Office of the Chief Scientist & Engineer and the NSW Environmental Trust. Programme ↗

Interview guaranteed — EnergyLab Climate Tech Charge

EnergyLab, Australia’s largest climate-tech accelerator, sat on the ClimateLaunchpad Australia National Final jury and undertook to give every finalist an interview for its Climate Tech Charge programme. Our application is in. Programme ↗

Who we are

Two researchers who got tired of the answer being "no".

Nariman Khorsandiardebili

Founder

Pavement geomechanics. How recycled granular materials carry, break and deform under traffic.

LinkedIn Google Scholar UTS SmartCrete CRC

Marzieh Dehghan Niri

Co-founder

Circular economy. Why industry adopts recycled materials, and what actually moves them.

LinkedIn Google Scholar UTS