RSTA named a finalist for Sustainability Innovation of the Year, and why road maintenance carbon deserves the spotlight

I’m delighted to share that the Road Surface Treatments Association (RSTA) has been named a finalist at the Highways Awards 2026, in the Sustainability Innovation of the Year category, for their work on carbon emissions across road surface and other maintenance treatments.

This one means a lot to me. PYE Management supported RSTA on the carbon work behind this entry, so seeing it recognised alongside some of the biggest names and biggest budgets in UK infrastructure feels like proof that good carbon work doesn’t need a major scheme attached to it to matter.

Road surface treatments rarely get the attention that new builds or major schemes do. They’re smaller, they happen more often, and they don’t come with the same headline budgets. But that’s exactly why the carbon conversation around them is so important. When you’re resurfacing, patching, or treating roads at the frequency the UK highways network requires, the carbon impact of how that work is specified and delivered adds up fast, and it adds up across the whole life of the asset, not just at the point of construction.

That’s the thinking behind whole-life carbon management, and it’s the same thinking behind PAS 2080. The standard doesn’t just ask “what did we build,” it asks how carbon was considered at every stage, and whether that can be evidenced. Maintenance and treatment work sits squarely inside that scope, even though it’s often the part of the conversation that gets skipped over.

RSTA’s entry looks directly at that gap: measuring and reducing carbon across road surface and other maintenance treatments, rather than treating it as a footnote to bigger projects. It’s a genuinely useful piece of work for the sector, and I think it says something good about where the industry’s attention is heading.

The winners will be announced on 23 September at the Park Plaza, Westminster Bridge, London, at what’s fairly billed as the biggest night in the highways calendar, alongside more than 900 guests from across the sector.

Whatever happens on the night, I wanted to mark this one publicly. Congratulations to RSTA and everyone involved in putting the entry together. If you’re working on carbon in road maintenance and treatments and want to talk through what that looks like in practice, I’d love to hear from you.

Fingers crossed for the 23rd.