Transportation officials in multiple states are testing whether roads made from grocery bags, juice cartons, printer ink cartridges or other discarded plastic can make pavement last longer, save money and reduce the amount of waste that ends up in landfills.
On sections of a busy, four-lane road that cuts through the University of Missouri-Columbia, for example, the Missouri Department of Transportation, in collaboration with the university, is running a pilot program that combines recycled plastic bottle pellets with an asphalt mix to pave the road.
“You can do theoretical stuff in a lab, but this is actually taking the next step, putting it on a real-world road with real traffic,” said Ed Hassinger, the agency’s chief engineer. “Our best-case scenario is that it makes the asphalt more resilient and durable and gets rid of a waste stream that no one can do anything with.”
