SkyscraperPage Forum - Los Angeles Is Testing Plastic Asphalt That Makes It Possible To Recycle Roads

Los Angeles Is Testing Plastic Asphalt That Makes It Possible To Recycle Roads

10.24.19

Read More: https://www.fastcompany.com/90420730...-recycle-roads

Quote:

A street in downtown L.A. will soon be repaved, but the road won’t be quite the standard asphalt road we’re used to. Instead, it will be covered with a material made, in part, from recycled plastic bottles. The plastic is a key in a new process for street paving: For the first time, the city will be able to grind up the existing road and fully recycle it in place, using the plastic to actually make the pavement stronger than it was before.

- “New synthetic binders are going to transform the global road construction or road rehabilitation marketplace, and they’re going to allow for roads to be 100% recycled,” says Sean Weaver, president of TechniSoil Industrial, the company that designed the new process. “That’s always been the holy grail of the road construction market could you recycle 100% of the top surface of the road, grind it up, crush it, and put it right back down, and have that be as durable as the original hot mixed asphalt road?” — The system uses a machine called a “recycling train” that grinds up the top few inches of a street, sends the material into a unit in the back that crushes the asphalt to a specific size, and then mixes it with liquid plastic. “It’s basically one continuous process, where the train mills the road, and then the finished road comes out the back end,” Weaver says.

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https://images.fastcompany.net/image...ic-asphalt.jpg