Along a quiet stretch of road in Maine, engineers buried something most people would expect to see in a scrapyard rather than beneath their tyres: about 20,000 discarded car tyres. The unusual experiment was designed to tackle two problems at once. Maine’s roads face a difficult seasonal cycle, with winter freezing the ground and spring thaw turning it soft and unstable. Gravel roads can quickly develop ruts and potholes as vehicles pass over the weakened surface. At the same time, the state produces more than a million unwanted tyres each year, creating a growing waste problem with few easy outlets.
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