Dutch Company Wants to Create Roads from Recycled Plastic Bottles

Recycling  

A Dutch construction company claims that it has come up with a more cost-effective and environmentally-friendly road-surfacing solution, involving the use of recycled plastic as an alternative to asphalt. Building roads using recycled water and soda bottles, they say, yields many environmental and economic benefits.

The way that roads are built and the pavement materials themselves – mainly asphalt – have a huge environmental impact, with an emission of nearly 1.5 million tons of carbon dioxide annually worldwide associated with the production of asphalt. Also, asphalt roads are a major contributor to the urban heat island effect, as they absorb the solar radiation during the day and release it during the night, making the areas around them considerably warmer.

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What's more, asphalt pavements are highly-susceptible to damage induced by UV rays, heavy vehicles, oxidation and water, and they require a lot of maintenance, which makes asphalt a less-than-ideal road-building material.

A construction and engineering company from The Netherlands claims that it has come up with a more cost-effective and environmentally-friendly road-surfacing solution, involving the use of recycled plastic as an alternative to asphalt. Netherlands-based VolkerWessels intends to launch a pilot project in collaboration with the city of Rotterdam, and build a road using recycled water and soda bottles, which they say would provide many environmental and economic benefits.

"We’re very positive towards the developments around PlasticRoad. Rotterdam is a city that is open to experiments and innovative adaptations in practice."

The project, dubbed PlasticRoad, will aim to construct roads that would consist of multiple pre-fabricated sections made of recycled plastic, which would be built off-site and then assembled on-site. This concept would drastically cut the time that is needed to build a road, and the company says that it is also less expensive than traditional road construction methods. Each section of the road will be hollow, allowing pipes and wiring to be embedded in it quickly and easily, which will certainly save local authorities and utility companies a lot of time and money when working on various infrastructure projects.

Another benefit of creating a road with pre-fabricated segments is that it would be much easier to maintain and repair, since it would allow construction workers to quickly remove a damaged section, repairing it off-site, replacing it with a new one in the meantime, so that drivers don't have to face the hassle that is usually involved in road construction.

The environmental benefits of plastic roads include reduced greenhouse gas emissions that are generated while putting new asphalt in place, and eliminating CO2 emissions that are produced when transporting raw materials to road construction sites.

The company claims that plastic roads would have a three-times longer lifespan than asphalt pavements, which sounds credible, considering that the average degradation time for a plastic bottle is 450 years. Also, they will not be as susceptible to damage from UV rays and water damage as asphalt roads are, because plastic has the ability to withstand extreme temperatures.

“We’re very positive towards the developments around PlasticRoad. Rotterdam is a city that is open to experiments and innovative adaptations in practice. We have a ‘street lab’ available where innovations like this can be tested,” said Jaap Peters, a member of Rotterdam city council's engineering bureau, in a statement for the Guardian, which first reported the story of the PlasticRoad project.

VolkerWessels hopes to be able to start installing the first pre-fabricated plastic road sections in Rotterdam in 2018.

By Jordan Perch

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Author Bio - Jordan Perch is an automotive fanatic and “safe driving” specialist. He is a writer for DMV.com, which is a collaborative community designed to help ease the stress and annoyance of “dealing with the DMV.”