The company's environmental management system, which was entered in the Spanish Registry of Intellectual Property on 10 July 2009 under the title "Environmental Behaviour Evaluation System", calls for practices to reduce the intensity of resource use in construction. Because of FCC's efforts in 2009, upward of 31.3 million cubic metres of surplus earth, rocks and rubble were reused.

FCC Construcción is participating in different R&D&i projects for smart resource use, an area in which it invested more than 1.5 million euro in 2009. The projects include: bituminous mixtures and asphalt mixtures containing disused tyres; asphalt mixtures incorporating filler and other waste products; Project Cleam (clean, efficient, environmentally friendly building); Project Lopcar (design and development of solutions for recycling paper mill sludge in civil engineering work); and Project OLIN (study of the qualities of and treatments for materials in improved embankments and graded surfaces).

In the last few days of June, as part of the upkeep and maintenance work on the Barcelona city streets and with the support of the Barcelona City Environment Department, FCC Construcción built a pavement using concrete containing recycled aggregate.

The experimental section of pavement lies on the seaward-facing edge of the Ronda Litoral between calle de Bilbao and calle de Bac de Roda, a neighbourhood where a number of street surface and pavement renovation jobs are being done. For the experimental pavement, a non-structural mass concrete was designed pursuant to the recommendations set in the current Spanish Regulation for Structural Concrete. The product is an HM-20 concrete in which 40% of the coarse aggregate was replaced by recycled aggregate that was a blend of ceramic and stone. The concrete was made in the plant that Hormigones Uniland (a subsidiary of the FCC-owned Portland Valderrivas Group) has in the Free Trade Zone, and the aggregate was specially provided by Gestora de Runes de la Construcción.

The first few days' results are very good, and the final texture has been deemed highly satisfactory by both the site management and city specialists, although the pavement will eventually be covered with a pigmented aggregate finish. To summarise, the recycled aggregate trial was an example of environmental innovation in line with FCC Construcción's strategic objectives.