ACLA® from Earthshot Prize finalist Low Carbon Materials is in the asphalt at Amazon’s new £40 million Stockton-on-Tees delivery station, one of three emerging construction technologies Amazon is testing on the site.
Amazon has used ACLA®, the carbon-storing additive from Low Carbon Materials (LCM), for the first time, at its new £40 million delivery station at Preston Farm Business Park in Stockton-on-Tees. The site opened on 21 October and is Amazon’s first net-zero carbon delivery station in the UK.
Amazon chose three emerging technologies to test at the site: cement-free paving from CarbiCrete, Paebbl’s carbon-storing material in the service yard concrete, and LCM’s ACLA® in the asphalt. Amazon describes this as “taking these technologies out of the lab and putting them to work on a real construction project”, and is using the site to test technologies that could be rolled out across its network.
ACLA® was supplied as part of Holcim UK’s Foamix Eco asphalt, used across the site, and made in Seaham, roughly 25 miles from the delivery station. Every tonne of ACLA® stores 798kg of CO₂e, a figure verified through a third-party Environmental Product Declaration (EPD). ACLA® is also lighter than conventional aggregate, cutting transport emissions, and if used in concrete it has the potential to reduce the weight a building’s structure has to support.
The 10,800m² building is designed to meet the UK Net Zero Carbon Buildings Standard, a framework Amazon helped develop, and is the first in Amazon’s global network to pursue the latest version (v1.1) of the Living Future Institute’s Zero Carbon Certification. It also uses lower-carbon steel, mass timber beams and rooftop solar panels.
Dr Natasha Boulding, CEO and co-founder of Low Carbon Materials, said: “The asphalt at Stockton isn’t just lower carbon. It’s storing carbon, in the fabric of the build.”
She added: “The barrier has never been the science. It’s whether someone will put it in a real building. This is a real building. A first-of-a-kind project is only first once. After that it’s a precedent, and this industry runs on precedent.”
LCM is now scaling up ACLA® manufacturing towards industrial scale in County Durham. Amazon says the evidence gathered at Stockton-on-Tees will be critical to give the wider construction industry the confidence to build with these technologies again. For LCM, it is the real-world evidence needed to turn a new material from an alternative option into an industry standard, opening the door to wider use across the UK, North America and Europe.
LCM is also part of Greentown Go Build 2026, an open-innovation programme Amazon backs alongside the Global CO2 Initiative to bring emerging CO2-mineralisation technologies from lab to construction site.
(Images source – Low Carbon Materials, courtesy of © NP John Millard, www.unp.co.uk, pictures@unp.co.uk)
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