What happens to a plastic milk bottle after the milk is gone? In most cases, it enters a recycling system that may or may not be able to process it. In Shanghai, thousands of such bottles took a very different route. They became part of a road.
More than 6,000 used milk bottles, together with other discarded plastic, were incorporated into a road project at East China University of Science and Technology (ECUST) in 2021. The unusual experiment was designed to demonstrate how plastic that is difficult for conventional recyclers to handle could instead be converted into a material for road construction.
