Feb 26 2016
Global industrial company Harsco Corporation announced today continuing success with its environmentally-focused applied products following the receipt of new orders for its SteelFlow asphalt product, a new addition to the Company’s extensive SteelPhalt™ line of slag-based road construction materials.
The orders follow a recent study conducted by the independent Transportation Research Laboratory in the UK substantiating the use of SteelFlow in higher traffic volume applications.
Harsco’s SteelPhalt™ business, a unit of the Company’s Metals & Minerals division, has been producing slag-based asphalt products in the UK for more than 50 years, leading the drive for sustainable asphalt materials produced almost exclusively from recycled content. Steel slag has inherent properties which make it ideally suited for use as a surface course for roadmaking:
- Exceptional strength and durability of steel slag extends the life of the road and lengthens road maintenance intervals
- Steel slag achieves high skid resistance and maintains it throughout the life of the road, based on its capacity to regenerate its surface roughness over time
- Avoids the use of quarried materials, and avoids the landfill of residual slag product
With SteelFlow, Harsco has introduced a blend of steel slag aggregate mixed with a resilient but highly flexible polymer that can be applied in thin layer surfaces as little as one-half inch in thickness (15 mm), less than half the thickness of standard materials. Customers are seeing benefits in faster installation times, reduced labor and greater surfacing areas for the same volume of product, giving SteelFlow an economic advantage over many traditional alternatives. Now, with research supporting the product’s use in high traffic volume areas, SteelFlow is receiving progressively greater interest across a broad range of road surfacing requirements. Additionally, opportunities exist to replicate this technology in other geographies in which Harsco operates.
Slag-based roadway products are just one part of Harsco’s comprehensive applied products focus. By utilizing the by-products of steel and metals production, coal-fired electric power generation and other industrial processes, Harsco is creating value-added aggregate products that offer effective, “zero waste” solutions for the environmentally beneficial reuse of materials as an alternative to landfill. Today, more than 30 percent of the Metals & Minerals division’s worldwide operating sites provide services related to the production and distribution of applied product solutions, ranging from asphalt road materials to soil conditioners, high crop-yield fertilizers, and industrial air-blast abrasives.
Harsco’s Metals & Minerals division is the largest and most comprehensive provider of onsite material processing and environmental services to the worldwide metals industry, with operations at approximately 140 customer sites across more than 30 countries. The division is a technology partner to cleaner, more efficient metal production, providing customers with economically and environmentally viable solutions for the treatment and reuse of production waste streams.