Strabag Builds Asphalt Mixing Plant in Orosháza

Strabag has opened an asphalt mixing plant in Orosháza, Békés County, with the brownfield investment costing more than HUF 950 million, the company said in a statement to MTI on Tuesday.

The original plant opened in 1998 but was closed following the 2008 world economic crisis. The new asphalt plant and service units, such as the hall, depot, raw material storage facilities, and offices, were built on the site of the original plant.

The plant has a nominal capacity of 240 tons of asphalt per hour, which means it can fill nine semi-trucks with asphalt per hour. The fully automated machine is suitable for dispensing foamed bitumen and producing reduced-temperature, moderately warm asphalt, they wrote. They noted that while the old plant mixed 270,000 tons of asphalt in 11 years, the new one, operating continuously throughout the day, would accomplish this in 110 days.

The site also has a 1,200-square-meter covered raw material storage facility equipped with solar panels. The solar panel investment, costing nearly HUF 46.5 million, was made with two objectives in mind: to reduce the moisture content of the raw material, resulting in energy savings during drying, and to increase the plant's own green energy production. All this contributes to lower specific energy consumption in the manufacturing process.

An important sustainability feature of the plant is the possibility of cold recycling of recovered asphalt. The technology allows old asphalt to be mixed into the new product as a secondary raw material up to the maximum ratio specified by standards. This reduces the use of primary raw materials and lowers the demand for bitumen, thereby reducing the carbon footprint of production, i.e., its environmental impact, according to the announcement.

The plant currently employs five people and primarily supplies raw materials for road construction projects in the region.

Strabag Hungary's team of more than 2,000 professionals produces more than 1 million tons of asphalt annually at 15 asphalt mixing plants.