BASF boosts support for sustainable road construction

“We are very pleased to be able to expand our portfolio with the highly effective RheoFalt^® products from Ventraco. With these products, we serve the constantly increasing demand for rejuvenators. This enables us to serve the need for sustainable road construction," says Dr. Mario Sandor, Head of Business Management Asphalt Performance at BASF. “We have an outstanding sales organization, which means we can offer customers easier access to RheoFalt^® products.”

With RheoFalt^® HP-AM, BASF has added a powerful rejuvenator to its portfolio. The product enables 100% recycling of old asphalt, and has been scoring outstanding results in internal and external tests for 10 years. RheoFalt^® HP-AM is the first organic rejuvenator worldwide based on 100% natural resin. It opens up the opportunity to recycle up to 100% of raw materials. The product improves the properties of weathered and hardened bitumen, rejuvenating old bitumen or reclaimed asphalt pavement (RAP).

The future market for rejuvenators

Mobility is increasing all over the world, and road construction is growing with it. In addition to the demand for new roads, a great deal of existing pavement requires renewal due to binder aging and compromised crack resistance on the surface. If the old asphalt is not recycled, the result is large quantities of waste.
“Many roads will have to be renewed in the next few years. We estimate that the market volume worldwide and especially in the region of EMEA will increase sharply in the near future,” says Mario Sandor. RheoFalt^® HP-AM allows lower usage of new materials and leads to a reduction in greenhouse gas emissions and energy consumption. “This enables us to offer a sustainable solution for road construction and to meet these growing needs,” Sandor adds.

Excellent research capacities

Since 2015, Ventraco has been conducting research at its Innovation Centre to optimize existing solutions and develop new ones. “We see that the use of additives in bitumen needs to be controlled and improved to achieve good quality. The development of high-performance additives requires a knowledge center with high-quality test equipment and solutions,” explains Jeroen Venema, Founder and managing director of Ventraco. “We are pleased to have won BASF for sales and the joint further development of our RheoFalt^® product. Together we have excellent laboratory capacities to develop high-performance products in the future.”
Since the beginning of 2019, BASF Asphalt Performance has been working on new and sustainable solutions for asphalt mixtures within the central Asphalt Performance platform. BASF maintains two laboratories in Ludwigshafen and Trostberg aimed at developing new high-performance additives for road construction. BASF offers polymer solutions for all types of asphalt paving applications. The company is one of the world’s leading suppliers of high-quality styrene-butadiene rubber (SBR) for the modification of bitumen emulsions for cold mixing applications.