Environmental issues feature increasingly in today's social and commercial world as less harmful and better ways are sought to manufacture and use a wide variety of products. This is why GEO320 is such an important invention, not only is it the first commercial development of a synthetic bitumen binder for the manufacture of asphalt that is made from non-petroleum based renewable resources eg sugar and molasses but it also possesses increased mechanical and rheological properties to that of normal road grade residue bitumen. Normal residue bitumen requires hot storage to remain in a viscous suspension until the time of asphalt mixing process. GEO320 MRH bitumen on the other hand is stored in a dry granulated form which is added to the hot aggregate mix at the time of asphalt manufacturing, this not only eliminates wastage (oxidized) bitumen and fuming but saves on fuel costs. The environment and the health of asphalt workers in the road construction industry was a high priority consideration in the twenty years that it took to research and develop GEO320 asphalt bitumen in Australia. Ecopave Australia has made numerous improvements into the chemistry and nature of petroleum based residue bitumen over the years and has applied this knowledge into GEO320 MRH bitumen technology.
One of the discoveries that Ecopave Australia has made is, that by replacing the processing oil
quantity in the bitumen formulation by an effective plasticizer in small amounts has the same
effect as using neat oil. This plasticizer addition completely eliminates the "binder shift" effect
thereby increasing skid resistance of asphalt surfaces and dramatically lowering the fuming
and emissions at conventional asphalt processing temperatures. Ecopave Australia research has also made a breakthrough in developing the Micro Mastic Matrix (MM) technology which is an improvement to conventional mastic asphalt which can be placed now from 1mm ultra thin
surface to a full 200mm thick load bearing pavement construction without using aggregate stone size larger than 10mm, the benefits are safer, stronger and more durable asphalt pavements.



GEO320 MRH Asphalt Bitumen was designed to have higher fatigue, durability and anti-skid performance than conventional (DGA) dense graded, (OGA) open graded or (SMA) stone mastic asphalts. GEO320 MRH asphalt can be laid at lower temperature 90 Deg C (Warm Mix), the interesting aspect of GEO320 MRH asphalt is in its low heat sbsorption characteristics, by much as 50% less compared to normal asphalt. GEO320 MRH bitumen is a non-petroleum based
binder with a volatile content less than 0.5% emitting only a fraction of fumes compared to petroleum based residue bitumen even at normal asphalt processing temperatures of around 170 Deg C.