Rubble to be recycled from city centre demolition

None of the rubble from the demolition of buildings for a huge city centre development will end up going to landfill, according to the councillor overseeing the project.

Work on the £450m Coventry's City Centre South project started in June 2025 and areas of the city centre like Shelton Square, the City Arcade, the Bull Yard and Barracks car park have been pulled down.

Jim O'Boyle, the cabinet member for regeneration and climate change at the city council, is in charge of the project which is due to finish in 2027.

"Not a single piece of rubble will go to landfill," he pledged. "All of it will be recycled, which I think is really important in terms of sustainability."

The multimillion-pound scheme, which will see more than 1,000 new apartments built along with shops, food and entertainment outlets, covers an area equivalent to nine football pitches.

Andy Towers is the project manager for the developers, The Hill Group, who are in charge of the scheme on behalf of the city council.

"These [piles of rubble] are arising from our demolition. It'd be crazy to send it away to then import stuff across the country, when we've good stuff here that we can crush and process and reuse," he said.

Each pile of twisted metal and broken, dirty concrete is part of a larger process, to reduce and reuse as much of the demolished buildings on site as possible.

Initially, machines are used to sort the larger pieces into more manageable ones and sort the metal from the hardcore.

The metal is then taken away for resmelting while the concrete and bricks crushed for use as "fill" on site.

That is needed so it can go into holes and gaps in the ground across the site, to provide a level surface that the new buildings will eventually be built on.

Towers said he was proud of the different piles of rubble dotted around the site.

"There's a lot of strategy to where we place the pile to make sure we don't snooker ourselves - or limit access to parts of the job we do need to get to and ultimately progress," he added.

Follow BBC Coventry & Warwickshire on BBC Sounds, Facebook, X and Instagram.