Concrete recycling Sunshine Coast: costs and on-site crushing

The Sunshine Coast has a particular version of the concrete problem. The building is constant, from Caloundra South and Palmview through the Maroochydore city centre and the Bruce Highway upgrades, but the recycling and disposal capacity sits a long way from most of the jobs generating the material. That gap is where the money goes. Here is what sending concrete away actually costs on a Sunshine Coast job once every line is counted, what crushing it where it already sits costs instead, and how to tell quickly which side of the line your job falls on.

The Coast generates concrete faster than it can absorb it

Growth on the Sunshine Coast runs on two tracks. The greenfield corridors at Caloundra South, Palmview and Beerwah East mean new roads, kerb and channel, hardstand and civil infrastructure going in continuously. At the same time the established centres, Maroochydore, Mooloolaba, Buderim, Nambour, Kawana and Coolum, are being redeveloped, which means slabs, driveways, footings and old pavement coming out. Both tracks finish in the same place: a stockpile of clean hard material and a decision about where it goes.

What the disposal route costs here

Sending clean concrete away is never a single charge. It is a stack of them:

• The Queensland waste levy. The Sunshine Coast sits in the metropolitan zone, Level 1, where the general levy rate is $135 per tonne for the 2026-27 financial year. It applies to material that leaves your site for disposal.
• Gate fees at the receiving facility, which for clean concrete around South-East Queensland now exceed $80 per tonne.
• Cartage, and this is the line that bites hardest on the Coast, because a round trip to a commercial facility can mean a long run on the Bruce Highway rather than a quick lap of the suburb.
• Loading plant and operator time spent filling trucks instead of progressing the job.
• Buying replacement road base and bringing it back up, which is a second set of truck movements and a second invoice.

Distance is the Sunshine Coast multiplier

On a Brisbane job, a truck sent to a recycling facility might be gone for an hour. On a job at Coolum, Nambour or Caloundra, the same errand can eat most of a shift once you count the highway, the queue at the gate and the run back. Every one of those hours is charged whether the truck is full or not, and none of it moves your program forward. The further your site is from the receiving facility, the larger the share of your disposal budget that is spent on driving rather than on disposal, and the more attractive it becomes to simply not send the material anywhere.

What crushing on site costs instead

We bring the RM 70GO! 2.0 mobile impact crusher to your Sunshine Coast site and turn the pile into usable product where it already is. Most jobs land around $10 per tonne, and higher-tonnage jobs can come in as low as $8 per tonne. The machine weighs everything it produces on its onboard belt scale, so you are billed on what actually came off the belt, not on an estimate. There is no separate day rate and no operator charge on top.

Take 300 tonnes of clean slab, kerb and footings off a civil job in the Caloundra South corridor. Sent to landfill, the waste levy alone is $40,500 at $135 per tonne, before a single gate fee or truck movement. Add facility charges and the highway haulage and the real number climbs a long way past that. Crushed where it sits at about $10 per tonne, the same 300 tonnes costs in the order of $3,000, and you finish with roughly 300 tonnes of compactable road base sitting on your job. On an estate that needs base anyway, the material you were about to pay to remove is the material you were about to pay to import.

Access on Coast sites

Sunshine Coast jobs run from tight infill blocks in Mooloolaba to open subdivision earthworks at Palmview, and the plant has to suit both. The RM 70GO! 2.0 weighs about 24 tonnes and arrives on a standard float, so there are no oversize permits, no escorts and no pilot vehicles to arrange, and it clears standard height clearances. It is typically crushing within about 20 minutes of arriving. Your excavator feeds it, and product comes off the belt graded and weighed, ready to place or stockpile.

When carting is still the right call

We will tell you when crushing does not stack up. Under roughly 20 tonnes, a skip or a removal contractor is usually the better answer, because a crusher cannot pay for its mobilisation on that volume. Concrete is heavy, around 2.4 tonnes per cubic metre, so skips reach their weight limit long before they look full. The other case is material that is not clean. We crush concrete, brick, rock and asphalt. If the pile is mixed with timber, plasterboard, soil or general rubbish, it needs to be separated first or handled another way.

For how a crushing day runs from float delivery through to stockpile, read about on-site concrete crushing.

To put a number against your own tonnage before you decide, use the crushing cost calculator.

The Sunshine Coast sits inside our core coverage alongside Brisbane, Ipswich, Logan and the Gold Coast. See the full South-East Queensland service area.

If you have concrete stacking up on a Sunshine Coast job and you want a straight answer on whether crushing beats carting, send through the tonnage and the address. If carting is genuinely cheaper for your volume, we will say so.