Recycle pavious - Reusing blocks to help save the world

[haggistini]

I haven’t seen the job yet but I have been told by the project manager that the customer wants to reuse the existing blocks on a drive, firstly to be environmentally friendly, secondly to keep the olde look of them .the first thing that popped in my head on reusing blocks was to steam clean them first and clean all the buildup of crud on jointed sides to relay them ,also the area of paving would have to be smaller due to spalled or broken blocks as trying to match the color of 10 year old blocks is going to be impossible, has anyone preformed such a task and anything I should be looking out for .
p.s. they have an old underground Victorian water storage tank which I was going to use as solution to this mystery science of permeable paving and the reusable water option will go down well with the ecomentalist sorry environmentalist building inspector/defra police sorry policy I should have some pictures Saturday which will add fuel the post cheers all
haggistini

[Pablo]

Hi Haggis if it's not too large an area by the time it's all back in the ground it will have cost about the same. Best way to do a lift and lay is to pressure wash the paving before you lift it then stack it in towers so you can clean the sides. Once they are fully cleaned bunch them up with a block cart and move them away. If the sides don't get cleaned then it will never sit right when relaying. Once down a light power wash and stiff brush will be enough to give it a final clean.

[James.Q]

did alot of the same type of work in holland, we had a machine with rollers on and a set of cogs, you fed the pavours throu and the cogs cleaned them up

[Dave_L]

You could almost double the price of the work to reuse blocks! Whenever we've had to rip up a driveway (not ours btw!) for insurance work, cleaning the pesky blocks of all sand and detritus took the time.

[haggistini]

thought the cleaning up would be a nightmare.. its 100 m2 so its gonna take a bit of time to clean them ,i hope i can convince them to sell them on to bring the cost of new down .mind you for the ammount of work i might double the price and let the job go!

[Rich H]

I've done this. Did what Pablo said; stacked in towers to clean. We threw away all the cuts, bought new blocks to compensate and randomly mixed those in with the old blocks. We used the old blocks for the new cuts.

[ambient]

i always tell customer that its same price to replace as clean old ones they usually go for new