The traditional materials used in paving roads are not very environmentally friendly, and the work can be dirty and hot. However, just outside Oroville, California, the California Department of Transportation (CalTrans) and landscaping innovation firm TechniSoil are testing a stretch of highway paved with a plastic-infused asphalt material, made from recycled bottles.

The president of TechniSoil Industrial, Sean Weaver told USA Today that the company’s polymer-infused roads are ‘sturdier, flatter, safer and more durable than those made with regular asphalt.’

The change in materials makes the pavement stronger. “Traditional asphalt roads rely on rock for the strength of the road,” says Weaver, “With our pavement, it relies on the matrix of a plastic binder for the strength, and the rock is simply a filler.” The new type of road resists potholes and cracking and can last two to three times longer than standard asphalt.

What’s more is that in repaving old roads, the process uses 100 per cent of the old asphalt, recycling the entire road surface, which removes the need for replacement materials to be shipped in from miles away, while also creating a new market for PET, the plastic commonly used in drinks bottles, and would potentially otherwise end up in a landfill.

Previously, paving contractors would remove and recycle the top three to six inches of the old road’s surface, but the resulting material would not be durable enough to be used as a new surface.

Contractors would still require traditional hot-mix asphalt to apply over the recycled road, adding materials, labour, and transportation costs, as well as increased greenhouse gas emissions in the production and transport of the material.

Using current methods, repaving a single lane-mile can require bringing in 42 truckloads of new material and hauling out another 42 truckloads of waste.

TechniSoil’s process eliminates the hot-mix step. The company’s process begins with PET, the common form of plastic found in plastic bottles and other single-use packaging, and chemically recycles it back into its original form of polymer chains. That then becomes a binder engineered to hold recycled asphalt together.

As previously, the top three inches of the road are ground up and then mixed with the liquid polymer binding agent made from the recycled PET bottles – approximately 150,000 bottles per mile.

This new recycled mix is durable enough to be used as the top layer of a highway road surface and promises to last even longer than traditional hot-mix asphalt. It would mean that there would money saved in the future with a reduced need for maintenance.

“The advantage with recycling in place is that we avoid all of the truck traffic in and out of the construction zone,” Weaver says. “We can do this work very seamlessly at night.”

That eliminates the emissions from those trips and makes it faster to complete the job. The standard process requires heat, but the new process works cold, saving more energy.

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