Our ever-increasing transportation costs make it best to use aggregate as close to the source as possible. Stone, sand and gravel are bulky and heavy, and the further we transport them, the more expensive they become.
It's not only the economic cost that rises when we move our pits and quarries further away, there are also environmental and social costs. Imagine the impact of having more trucks on the roads driving longer distances; greenhouse gases increase as does traffic.
Economically, about one-half of the cost of sand and stone on a job site is the cost of transportation. Since governments, and hence the taxpayer, use over half of the aggregates produced in the province, every taxpayer benefits from keeping the pits and quarries as close to markets as possible.
Where we get the aggregate from to build our communities matters.
Just like food, using close-to-market aggregates significantly reduces environmental and economic impacts.
Be eco friendly. Don't make gravel travel.
If every aggregate truck were to travel one extra kilometre to its job site, an extra 2.5 million litres of fossil fuel would be consumed annually - that's 7,000 tonnes of greenhouse gas emissions (GHGs).
Put another way, if aggregate was long-haul trucked to the GTA from Northern Ontario, it would take 2500 trucks/day and generate 13 million tonnes of GHG emissions - the equivalent to annual emissions from 3 million cars.
From an economic point of view, half the cost of gravel is transportation. With 60% of gravel going into government infrastructure, the more cost-effective the project, the less taxes for all of us.