In 1970, a street in Fullerton, California, became an unusual experiment in recycling when crushed waste glass was used as a major part of its asphalt surface. Instead of sending unwanted bottles to disposal, the material was processed and incorporated into a road mixture that covered part of a 600-foot stretch in the Fullerton Air Industrial Park. At the time, researchers were investigating whether discarded bottles could replace some or all of the conventional mineral aggregate used in asphalt. The Fullerton experiment provided an opportunity to observe how such a material behaved under actual traffic rather than only in laboratory tests.
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