Greenprint
Greenprint: innovation for greener highways
Greenprint is a 3-year joint project between West Sussex County Council (WSCC) and South Gloucestershire Council. It aims to make roadside verges more valuable and better for the environment, community and economy. We are also helping to cut down pollution.
Learn about:
- what happens to the grass we cut
- how Greenprint can benefit plants and wildlife
- how it supports our goal of becoming carbon neutral by 2030
See the latest project updates in our May to June 2025 Greenprint newsletter.
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Live Labs 2
We are working together with South Gloucestershire Council to test new ways of looking after highway verges. We collect grass cuttings from selected green spaces and verges to see if we can turn them into biofuels and biochar. We can add these to asphalt to build cheaper and more eco-friendly roads.
Greenprint is part of the nationwide ADEPT Live Labs 2: Decarbonising Local Roads in the UK project. It is a 3-year plan to help make local roads greener and cleaner. The Department of Transport (DfT) gave £30 million of funding to the project. Greenprint is one of 7 groups from across the UK, between Lanarkshire and Devon, that get a share the funding.
Project update
July 2025
Greenprint is working hard to find out how other local authorities can take care of verges better.
In our second year we:
- found better ways to measure carbon emissions
- used cut and collect grass management in more areas
- successfully tested making biochar from the grass cuttings
- decided not to use hydrothermal carbonisation (HTC) as a way of processing the grass cuttings
- found ways to save money while taking care of green spaces
- identified more plant species and tested soil to measure the benefit for the environment
See all the details in our year 2 report below.
Greenprint year 2 report (PDF, 2.7MB)