The Process of Hot-In-Place Recycling

With the ever-growing interest from Local Agencies in alternative road treatment methods, due to rising material and construction costs, our County has had a growing interest in HIR. Whether it be construction methods, design inquiries, or material testing. Gallagher has been both proactive and transparent in providing the needed coordination, testing reports, and knowledge from many of their key staff for the correct determination of Hot In-Place treatment and methods on our roadways.

Hot In-Place construction saw consistent production with minimal disruption to traffic. McHenry County has been pleased with the results of the final product and look forward to using Hot In-Place as a cost savings rehabilitation tool in future contracts.

From start to finish, working with Gallagher Asphalt on our County HIR projects was phenomenal. The staff is extremely knowledgeable and went the extra mile to help ensure the roads we were proposing were great candidates for their HIR process. The construction crews were professional, knowledgeable, and efficient with their work and completed the process with minimal disruption to the traveling public. We completed a wide variety of roads over two construction seasons (2022,2023) from urban to rural cross-sections as well as 19 miles of shoulder/bike lane section and 28 miles of roadways. Hot in place recycling allowed us as a County to pave many more miles with the limited budget we had compared to traditional pavement resurfacing methods, which made a greater impact on our roadway network system. As a small County with limited resources, HIR was a perfect solution to give our roadways life back without breaking the bank and the end results exceeded expectations.

Our 26 miles of Hot In-Place recycled roads that Gallagher has built for us over the last 5 years are incredibly smooth and continue to perform well. It has been a very cost-effective way for us to rehabilitate the asphalt surface without hauling anything in or out of the project. Another great tool in our toolbox for fixing roads in Champaign County.

“Gallagher Asphalt, the leader in innovative paving in the Chicago Southland, has been utilizing the process of ‘energy efficient paving’ long before it became glamorous. Hot In-Place Recycling has been the method of choice for savings for many of our clients, and with the latest economic impacts on the world’s oil markets, the past 20% savings are now pushing 50%. That savings allows us to pave many more miles per dollar invested.”

“I went out there and looked at the process and it’s a wonderful process. We had an old subdivision where the road was all broken up. This procedure melts the pavement that’s there and levels out the road, and then we put asphalt on top of it, and that’s the smoothest road I’ve ever ridden on. That sold me on the process. This is a new tool that Cobb County has to work with.”