Buildings demolished during Exeter University’s multimillion pound redevelopment will be used to create 1.6km of roads at a new caravan and campsite in East Devon.

Crealy Meadows, a 138 pitch campsite owned by parent company Crealy Great Adventure Parks, has taken delivery of more than 5,000 tonnes of aggregate from the University to form the new roads at the award winning attractions latest project.

The first installment of rubble was delivered to Crealy Meadows in December, where it was then crushed on site using a mobile concrete crusher provided by Wring Group Limited, demolition experts based on Sowton Industrial Estate.

Peter Williams, Contracts Manager, of Wring explains a bit more about the process:

“The buildings were taken down using a 360 demo machine. Some of the buildings were light weight block and others reinforced concrete. The material is semi processed on site, separating the aggregate from the reinforced steel bars. This provides two recycling streams, one concrete and the other scrap metal.”

“Crushing is a pretty straightforward process so long as the rubble is reasonably clean as this lessens time handpicking out any unsuitable material. It only took around ten days for the crusher to get through the material needed for Crealy Meadows.” 

Last year, the Wring Group crushed and recycled around 50,000 tonnes of material waste and approximately 14,000 tonnes of metal.

“Although around 300 trips were required to deliver the rubble needed to create the new road infrastructure for the campsite, it has ultimately saved 5,000 tonnes of waste being dumped into the countryside as landfill,” said Julian Shaddick, Crealy Meadows project manager.

“We always try to work with contractors local to the demolition site in order to lessen the environmental impact and with Crealy only being a few miles from the site they proved an ideal candidate for the rubble,” comments Peter. 

Devon’s Crealy received a silver award from the Green Tourism Business Scheme in 2011 and Crealy Meadows will also use recycled railway stone for the drainage system and all timber will be sourced from the UK - helping the family attraction achieve its goal of sustainable construction.

So, when tourists start embarking on their holiday at the Crealy Meadows, which opens in May this year, little will they know that they will be driving on top of local landmarks.

Crealy Great Adventure Park are members of thebestofexeter see there offer here