How East London Contractors Cut Aggregate Costs by Backloading the Grab Lorry

On a typical East London groundworks job you pay for a grab lorry to take the spoil away, then pay again a day later for a tipper to bring Type 1 back in. Two movements, two charges, two slots in a logistics schedule that is already tight. On a lot of jobs, one lorry can do both.

It is called backloading, and it is standard practice on larger civils sites. Most SME contractors never get offered it, because the firm taking your muck away and the firm selling you aggregate are usually two different companies with no reason to talk to each other.

What Backloading Actually Means

The grab lorry arrives, loads your spoil, and takes it to an inert recycling facility. At that facility the muck gets tipped, screened and crushed into recycled aggregate. Instead of driving back to you empty, the lorry loads recycled Type 1 or crushed concrete at the same site and brings it straight to your job.

You save the return leg. The haulage cost on the inbound material drops, and in most cases you save a day on the programme because the material is on site the same afternoon rather than waiting for a separate delivery slot.

The material itself is also cheaper. Recycled Type 1 produced from crushed concrete and hardcore typically costs less than primary quarried stone, and for sub-base under a driveway, hardstanding, slab or access road it does the same job to the same specification.

Why This Works Well in East London Specifically

East London has a high density of inert transfer stations and recycling facilities, particularly around Barking, Rainham and the Lea Valley corridor. On a Tower Hamlets or Hackney site, your muck is usually going a relatively short distance, which means the return leg is short too and the economics stack up.

Congestion helps the case rather than hurting it. Every lorry movement into a restricted East London street costs you time and coordination with your groundworks team. Halving the number of movements is worth more here than it would be on an open site in the home counties.

If you are already planning your spoil removal, the muckaway guide for East London contractors covers material classification and disposal routes in more detail.

Which Materials Backload and Which Do Not

What comes back on the lorry is limited to what the facility produces. In practice that means:

• Recycled Type 1 MOT. Crushed concrete and hardcore graded to 40mm down. Sub-base for driveways, patios, slabs, hardstanding and access roads.
• Crushed concrete, 6F2 and similar fills. Coarser capping and bulk fill material.
• Recycled screened soil. Backfill and landscaping where specification allows.

Primary materials do not backload, because they come from a quarry rather than a recycling facility. Sharp sand, ballast, building sand, shingle, decorative stone and topsoil all need a separate delivery. If your job needs a mix of recycled sub-base and primary materials, the sub-base can still come back on the grab and the rest gets ordered in alongside it.

Weight Decides Your Order, Not Volume

Aggregate is dense, so a grab lorry hits its weight limit long before the body is full. Type 1 sits around 1.9 to 2.1 tonnes per cubic metre depending on how wet it is.

As a rough guide, a 6-wheeler carries in the region of 12 tonnes and an 8-wheeler in the region of 16 tonnes. On Type 1 that is roughly 6 cubic metres and 8 cubic metres respectively. Confirm the exact payload with whoever supplies the lorry, because it varies by vehicle.

So work your aggregate order in tonnes, not in cubic metres. Take the area you are covering, multiply by the compacted depth, then multiply by 2.0 to get an approximate tonnage. A 50 square metre driveway at 150mm sub-base is 7.5 cubic metres, or roughly 15 tonnes, which is one 8-wheeler load and a bit. Order the full 16 tonnes rather than run 2 tonnes short and pay for a second delivery.

When Backloading Is Not Worth It

It is not the right call on every job. Four situations where it falls down:

Contaminated or made ground. Large parts of East London sit on former industrial and dock land, and made ground frequently needs testing before it can be disposed of. If your spoil is not clean inert, it goes to a different facility, and that facility does not produce aggregate. No backload.

Mixed loads. Spoil with plasterboard, timber, plastic or general rubble in it is not inert. It gets rejected at the gate or surcharged heavily. Today's post on why grab hire loads get rejected in East London covers what triggers a refusal.

Timing mismatch. Backloading only works if you actually want the material the same day you are digging out. If you are excavating in week one and laying sub-base in week three, there is nothing to backload onto.

No stockpile space. The aggregate comes off the lorry in one go. On a tight terraced site with nowhere to tip 16 tonnes, a bagged or smaller delivery is more practical even if it costs more per tonne.

How to Set It Up

Three things make it work:

Book both sides at once. Tell whoever arranges your muckaway that you want material back on the same movement, and give them the quantity and specification at the point of booking. Asked on the day, it will not happen.

Give notice. The facility needs to know the lorry is loading out as well as tipping in. A day is usually enough, more in a busy week.

Clear the drop point before the lorry arrives. The grab is tipping straight off the back, so the spot needs to be accessible and empty. Positioning matters as much on the way in as it does on the way out, which the grab hire setup guide goes through step by step.

Common Mistakes

The most frequent one is ordering aggregate by volume when the lorry is limited by weight, then finding the load is short. Work in tonnes.

The second is assuming recycled Type 1 will not meet spec. For sub-base and fill it generally will, and it is worth checking the specification rather than paying for primary stone by default. If the job genuinely calls for quarried material, order it separately and do not compromise.

The third is leaving it too late. Once the grab is booked as a one-way movement, adding a return load means a separate job and the saving is gone.

Why WasteHub Handles Both Sides

Because we arrange the muckaway and the aggregate through the same network, we can plan both legs on one movement rather than treating them as two unrelated jobs. You tell us what is coming out and what needs to go back in, and we work out whether a backload is possible, what it saves, and whether the material meets your specification.

If the spoil is not suitable or the timings do not line up, we say so upfront and price the two movements separately. No guesswork, no surprise second delivery charge.

Get a quote and tell us what is coming out of the ground. We will tell you what can come back in on the same lorry.