Cumbria road reused 500,000 plastic bottles; trial later deemed successful
Cumbria, England, successfully trialed the use of recycled plastic pellets to replace bitumen in road construction. The project diverted the equivalent of 500,000 plastic bottles from landfills to create more sustainable road surfaces.
Why it matters
This innovation demonstrates a practical application of circular economy principles in infrastructure to reduce carbon footprints and waste.
Kingstown Road and Scotland Road form one of the main routes into Carlisle, and by autumn 2017 they had a new skin. Some of the bitumen holding the asphalt together had been replaced with pellets made from waste plastic.Cumbria, an area in England, wanted to make roads the better way. Roads that are environmentally friendly. Regular roads use bitumen, which requires a lot of energy and materials and results in pollution. So, they did something extraordinary. They built a road using waste materials.The £200,000 project, completed by MacRebur in September, was one of several major road resurfacing projects in the county using recycled plastic.Regular roads had to goBitumen, the oil-derived binder in asphalt, carries a carbon cost. Companies such as MacRebur had a solution. They made waste plastic into small pellets that could be added to the material used to make roads.
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