Recycled Plastic Makes Asphalt Roads 60% Stronger

Makes perfect sense.

Years ago (before there was an Internet) I read an article about pavement being mixed with ground-up tyres. This seems like a natural extension of that idea. Wonder why it took so long...

It is a waste of perfectly good fuel, but yes, you can do that.

BTW whose as-phalt is that?

NYC took a different approach and used ground up glass mixed in with the aggregate, as have other jurisdictions.

I'd like to see this stuff adopted soon (if it works as well as they claim). There is a pothole at the end of our driveway that keeps coming back every year. Would love to see the fix last longer than 12 months.

What about the potential for general paving?

When I lived near Boston I noticed a pothole that stretched from Revere south to Hyannisport.

They have had plastic membrane underlayment for pavement (Phillips) since the late 1980's I think, some places have not implemented use, however, but it would stop the recurrence of pot holes, since it has to do with how much water gets coupled into the dirt below the asphalt, then softens the soil to pliable mush. Isn't plasticity a wonderful thing?

One thing you might try, is lose some weight, since your moniker portrait seems quite portly. (Just kidding).

Although, in Texas, most pot holes are caused either by pot guts, or by fat arses.

I think one of the biggest hurdles was all the metal found in tires due to the countless variations on how a steel belted tire plus it typically steel wire/cable reinforced lip is made.

In many tires that steel reinforcement around the lip is solid wire and not the fine flexible stuff the belting is made from which means if it gets into a roadway you have a huge potential for producing flat tires.

They ran into that problem when they experimented with using old asphalt roofing shingles and such materials in roadways and found out that many roofs were made with aluminum nails and staples that were not sorted out by the magnetic separators they used to get the steel one out so the roads the experimented with that on lead to countless flat tires for their efforts.

Also to reduce a tire down to asphalt aggregate size bits takes a considerable amount of energy for the volumes produced.

Some years ago a guy I worked for one summer (wanna be engineer with little basic sense and even less engineering skills) went about building a huge tire shredder machine with the intent to corner the market in our region on shredding tires.

Fatal flaws as I was told, was that to make his machine work it needed a huge engine so he got a huge boat engine rail freighted in from who knows where on the coast which between the cost of the engine, the work and money in getting it here plus making it work put the operation way over budget.

Then to top it off apparently he did not factor in just how much fuel a several thousand HP engine burns. finding out one that size can burn a semi tanker truckload and then some a day, Vs one a week, was a real kick in the nuts and any hope in having an actual profit margin that would pay for the project in any rational time frame.

It was some time ago when steel-belted tyres weren't as common and so they had plenty of old, steel-less tyres to work with. I don't know what the fraction is today but I reckon most are steel-belted these days. Still, the concept of mixing recycled plastics in asphalt isn't all that much different in principle. I mentioned the tyres because it's basically the same idea, and so I'm wondering why it took them so long. It's a great idea if it works.

It would definitely be a booster for plastic recycling operations nationwide.

Having a customer that is not fussy about how clean or well sorted the plastic is would make things way more cost effective to work with.

Recycled bottles can be converted into textile fiber, fruit packaging, strapping, and many other uses, including more bottles, all replacing new material (a key aim of recycling). Don't forget economics: prices for recycled plastics have dropped in accord with lower petroleum prices, but still are more than road-builders will be able to pay. Cities and counties with crumbling roads often have minimal funds to fix them, and residents are reluctant to pay more in gas or other tax to provide this money. Are there different grades of asphalt? I suspect airport runways use longer-lasting grades. Is there a road-builder here who can add a professional comment?