Creating Roads From Recycled Plastic Waste

SEATTLE (Waste Advantage): When Engineer Toby McCartney was working in southern India with a charity that aided pickers who worked at landfill sites harvesting reusable items and selling them, he discovered that plastic waste they retrieved was being put into potholes in roads, doused with gasoline, and set afire. When the plastic melted into the holes and then hardened, it filled them.

Returning to Scotland, he told two of his friends about what he had seen and they decided that it would work better to use plastic waste to create a new type of material specifically designed for use in roads, developing a method for transforming a mix of industrial and consumer plastic waste into pellets of a new material that could hold asphalt together in roads.

Since MacRebur started operations in April 2016, the company’s recycled plastic road-building material has been used to build roadways in places ranging from Australia to Dubai. The company avoids using PET bottles and other types of plastic that are easily recycled, and instead concentrates on types of waste plastic that might otherwise end up buried in the ground.

In addition to keeping plastic out of landfills, the company’s plastic road materials can save about 1 ton in carbon dioxide output for each ton of bitumen that the plastic replaces. The company has developed different types of road-building plastic for different environments. One variety is designed for roads in places such as the Middle East, where more tensile strength is needed to resist asphalt’s tendency to deform from heat. Another is designed to be more flexible and resist the freeze-thaw cycle in colder places such as Canada or Scotland.

Courtesy: https://wasteadvantage.com