On a coal mine, haul trucks travelling unpaved roads account for around 40% of PM10 dust emissions, more than any other single source on site.
That figure reframes haul road management from a housekeeping task into one of the more consequential levers an operator has over occupational exposure, community impact, and operating cost.
In fact, it is the figure Dust-A-Side Australia leads with when explaining why it has spent more than five decades focused almost entirely on this one problem.
Dust-A-Side, a division of the Colas Australia Group, has been developing dust control and road stabilisation solutions since the brand originated in South Africa in 1973.
In Australia, its work spans haul roads, service and light vehicle roads, laydown and yard areas, and processing and material handling across mining, quarrying, civil construction, port, and rail operations.
Why water alone is a losing strategy
The default dust control method on most mine sites is a water cart, and it is also the most expensive and least durable option available. Untreated water evaporates quickly, as roads require continuous reapplication throughout a shift. This consumes enormous volumes of water in regions where water is often scarce and costly to source.
It also does nothing to address the underlying structural problem: most mine haul roads carry a wearing course of 200–500mm in depth. This requires complete re-sheeting every one to three years due to deterioration, a maintenance cost that water alone cannot reduce.
Dust-A-Side’s flagship product, DAS Product, takes a fundamentally different approach. It is a bituminous emulsion — fine droplets of bitumen dispersed in water using specialised emulsifiers — that can be sprayed onto a road surface or incorporated directly into the wearing course.
Once the emulsion breaks and the bitumen cures, it forms a water-impermeable, bound layer that physically glues road material together rather than simply wetting it.
That distinction matters because a bound surface resists water ingress from rain as effectively as it suppresses dust in dry conditions. This makes it what Dust-A-Side describes as an all-weather treatment rather than a dry-season-only fix.
The numbers behind the claim
Dust-A-Side’s published performance figures are specific rather than promotional in tone:
- Up to 95% reduction in water consumption compared with conventional water cart suppression
- Up to 90% reduction in operational dust levels
- 30% reduction in rolling resistance that lowers both fuel use and equipment wear
- 3% reduction in fuel consumption from the smoother running surface itself
Reduced rolling resistance is a detail worth pausing on, since it links dust control directly to two costs that mine operators track closely regardless of environmental considerations. The first is tyre wear on haul trucks, which are among the most expensive consumables on any open-cut site; and secondly, fuel burn across a haul fleet running continuously.
The wet-season case is where the product’s value becomes most visible operationally. Haulage on unsealed roads is routinely halted during heavy rain due to poor visibility and unsafe, muddy conditions, and that downtime compounds quickly across a large fleet.
A stabilised, sealed road dries faster and avoids the rutting and washouts that follow untreated wet-weather cycles, directly reducing the number of shifts lost to weather-related stand-downs.
Service models built around how mine sites actually operate
Rather than selling product alone, Dust-A-Side structures its offering around five service tiers:
- Full service, where it supplies personnel, trucks, water carts, and graders alongside the product itself
- Managed service, where a full-time project supervisor oversees delivery using the client’s existing assets
- Remote supervision, involving periodic site visits and telemetry-based monitoring
- Supply-only, for clients who prefer to apply the product with their own equipment
- Equipment rental for items such as fog cannons
This range allows a mine to scale its engagement from a fully outsourced arrangement down to a straightforward product purchase, without changing the underlying dust control chemistry.
Backed by an international roads and materials group
Dust-A-Side’s parent, the Colas Group, is a major international roads and infrastructure materials company. That backing gives the Australian operation access to a substantially larger base of research, formulation expertise, and global case history than a standalone local supplier could draw on.
Locally, Dust-A-Side holds SQI and JAS-ANZ certification. Its product range has expanded beyond bituminous emulsions into polymer-based binders, organic binders, and surfactant technologies. This provides options suited to different soil types, climates, and regulatory environments across Australian mining regions.
For operators reassessing how their haul road budget is allocated between water cart hours, road re-sheeting, and downtime from wet weather closures, the underlying case Dust-A-Side makes is straightforward.
For the company, dust suppression and road stabilisation are not separate line items; and treating them as one problem by using a bound surface rather than a continuously reapplied liquid is where the larger savings and safety gains tend to sit.
Image Credit: dustaside.com.au
