Every so often, a storm, a leak, or a renovation puts a dumpster in a driveway and sends a roof’s worth of shingles to the curb. Most Americans never wonder where that pile ends up. In the mid-1990s, the engineers in Georgia asked a stranger question: what if it ended up under our tires? According to Watson, Johnson, and Sharma’s 1998 paper titled “Georgia’s Experience with Recycled Roofing Shingles in Asphaltic Concrete,” published in the Transportation Research Record: Journal of the Transportation Research Board, the Georgia Department of Transportation built two test sections of hot-mix asphalt using shingle waste. The waste for these two sections specifically came from a roofing manufacturer and was mostly discolored or damaged factory scrap, not material pulled off old roofs. One section was on Chatham Parkway in Chatham County; the other was on State Route 21 in Effingham County. Both were reported to be performing well compared with control sections of ordinary pavement.
The trash problem and why a roof and a road make sense together
