Plastic Roads, Extreme Recycling

One of the most interesting initiatives I have seen when it comes to recycling is a reality thanks to one of the largest manufacturers of plastic, although many countries in the world have regulated the use of plastics is still a problem and seems not to disappear but rather be everywhere. Today we will discover the company Dow Chemical one of the leading plastic producers in the world market, is developing a project to build roads with recycled plastic. Join me to learn more about this incredible initiative.

Dow Chemical is a North American company present in the whole planet considered one of the main companies of plastic processing and production on a global scale, at the moment it is developing a project dedicated to the construction of roads of automotive transit with recycled plastic.

Since about 3 years ago began with the first road made of recycled plastic in Indonesia that was chosen after a contest of the country that pollutes the planet more with plastic, due to the internal policies of Indonesia managed to establish a goal of reducing the waste that end up in the ocean by more than 70% by 2025 so they contacted the company Dow Chemical to work together on this ambitious project that seeks to collect plastic to transform it into raw material for the manufacture of roads.

It is easy to think about how you can make a plastic road but the technique is far from what we would normally think, first you must choose plastic that is capable of meeting the chemical requirements, then crushed and washed very well, and the rest of the process is very similar to the traditional method where bitumen or industrial oils are added to asphalt, in this case, the plastic that has been selected, and proceeds to place and compact the materials.

The most ambitious area was in India, Pune and Bangalore where they recycled 100 tons of plastic with which they built roads for more than 20,000 kilometers, something really hopeful to really achieve that part of the plastic that is discarded ends in roads, also offers multiple advantages such as for example roads are more resistant than traditional roads. They withstand much more pressure from even heavy transport cars such as trucks. And the best thing is that they lower the cost of production because it is a recycled material, in addition to the fact that their maintenance cost is very low.

But not everything is rosy, there are also disadvantages that can end up being a double-edged sword for this excellent initiative. For example, when materials are heated very toxic gases are generated that can end up becoming greenhouse gases, now imagine that they start building this type of plastic roads globally, it would be chaos.

This is really promising, although I feel that at some point the plastic would run out of so many roads, but seeing it from the economic point of view can translate into incredible savings for countries that can not afford neither the maintenance nor the manufacture of new sections in their countries, as is the case of India, a giant country that always demands more ways to mobilize its millions of inhabitants.
As usual, just wait to see what happens with this project that looks great, a way to give a new utility to plastic our worst nightmare in pollution.