Do you know your PP from your HDPE, and your PVC from your soft plastics? Plastic recycling is a minefield, so here's how to tell what you're dealing with and which bin you should put it in.
Ground up plastic waste has been shown to work well in asphalt. It’s a shame no one is doing it. It’s an easy way to dispose of it, lowers the cost of asphalt, and makes it more resilient.
And the asphalt can be torn up and reused for new roads when it’s time to repave.
This solution will worsen micro plastic pollution in the environment. We need to be moving towards a solution where we can control where the final destination of the plastic is.
As someone who has worked with asphalt, we have tried using different mixes with plastic, glass, shredded rubber and printer ink cartridges in it, hard part is organising it with the batch plants, it only tends to happen when they decide to do trials with it, otherwise it's just the normal emulsion, stone and sand mix.
The laying and finish seems relatively the same across all the mixes, time will tell with the time it takes to break down and has to be replaced