The high-grade compaction sand is made with up to 40% washed glass sand produced from
kerbside recycled glass bottles
For immediate release, 5 August 2025, Sydney: Leading construction materials company Boral Limited (Boral) has received approval from Sydney Water on its flagship blended high grade compaction sand for use as an approved non-standard product. The innovative product was designed specifically to meet Sydney Water's stringent material specifications, providing an environmentally sustainable and easily compacted alternative for pipe laying applications.
The Upper South Creek Advanced Water Recycling Centre, Sydney Water’s largest infrastructure investment in Western Sydney, is the first project to use the flagship Boral Blended High-Grade Compaction Sand (HGCS) as an approved material, following more than 12 months of extensive collaboration and successful trials involving John Holland, Sydney Water and Boral, respectively.
Boral HGCS is a sustainable blend of natural sand combined with up to 40 per cent double-washed glass sand. Glass sand is made from washed, kerbside recycled glass bottles – a solution to the diminishing natural resource and has similar, but improved, engineering characteristics to natural sand.
Boral sources its glass from recycling company IQ Renew, which it also worked with in the initial development stage, to find an appropriate grade of glass to meet Boral’s standards. The HGCS blend is then created at Boral’s Emu Plains recycling facility.
Jeff Adams, Recycled Product Manager at Boral, says: “We are pleased to have an innovative glass compaction sand alternative to supply to construction projects across NSW and for Sydney Water, specifically, given the critical supply of natural washed bedding sand. Our glass sand provides economic and environmental benefits when used instead of diminishing natural resources that require transporting long distances, as well as the obvious avoidance of glass into landfill.
“The incorporation of glass sand into Boral products has been a six-year journey from initially finding a suitable source, working with the NSW Environment Protection Authority (EPA) to establish a Boral-specific glass sand order, to now having approval from Sydney Water on our flagship Boral Blended High-Grade Compaction sand.
“By using double-washed glass sand, we are providing a sustainable alternative to projects and demonstrating the strength of reusing materials to create a circular economy. We look forward to continuing our work with Sydney Water and its contractors to provide sustainable material into the market.”
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For media enquiries, please contact:
Macrina Lim, FTI Consulting
0430 547 751
macrina.lim@fticonsulting.com
About Boral
Boral is the largest vertically integrated construction materials company in Australia.
Our network includes prized quarry and cement infrastructure, bitumen, construction materials recycling, asphalt and concrete batching operations.
We employ about 7,500 employees and contractors across our operations that span more than 360 sites nation-wide.
For more than 75 years we’ve been building something great in Australia - rarely a day goes by that you wouldn’t pass one of our sites or trucks, enter a building, use a road, bridge, tunnel, footpath or other critical infrastructure that our people and products have helped enable.
