Jason Stubbings, chief operating officer for Arabian Agencies Company (ARACO), has said that his company is working hard to promote Astec’s “6 pack” asphalt recycling system as construction in Qatar continues to boom.
ARACO is the authorised dealer for Astec, Volvo Construction Equipment, Scania Powerscreen, and Traincore in the region and is determined to minimise the environmental impact of its vehicles, according to Stubbings.
Speaking to Construction Week at Project Qatar 2012, Stubbings said, “We see sustainability of pricing, especially aggregate, in a market that’s going to explode over the next 20 to 30 years,” Stubbings said.
“We in ARACO want to be part of Qatar’s 2030 Vision, we know there’s a lot of infrastructure to be built for FIFA 2022 and aggregate is going to be one of the main supply issues.
“If they can’t produce it locally, they’ll have to import it. So recycling is something that we thought would be a very important initiative that ARACO participated in. That’s where Astec Asphalt comes in,” he added.
Stubbings is hopeful that the Qatari government will increase its focus on sustainability and promote greater use of recycled material in the coming years.
He went on to highlight the benefits for those involved, saying that “it will save the contractors a lot of money, it will reduce the environmental impact of the industry, and it will reduce the cost for the government.”
The ARACO chief also said that his company is trying hard to address the problem created by poor fuel quality in the GCC.
“We do have a little bit of a problem in the Gulf region with fuel quality. In Europe they are driving towards greener fuel, whereas we are behind, but it is on our agenda. We’re looking at fitting catalytic converters to improve the environmental impact of our trucks,” he said.
According to Stubbings, ARACO are trying to introduce machines that have higher productivity with the introduction of a system called Caretrack which maximises efficiency for the operator.
The Caretrack system gives operators a read-out report of every piece of equipment that they have in order to identify when and where efficiency savings can be made.
“One of the big costs is fuel. Operators here tend to leave the engines idling for numerous hours,” said Stubbings.
“This takes away the competitiveness of those companies, especially when they are bidding and look at their fuel costs,” he added.
With the information gleaned from Caretrack’s reports contractors can compare efficiencies across sites and find savings by identifying discrepancies.
