How Cumbria turned waste plastic into roads

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. When the council came up with the idea of sustainable, eco-friendly roads, MacRebur suggested replacing a share of the bitumen with waste plastic that would otherwise end up in landfill or an incinerator. So, plastics equivalent to roughly 500,000 bottles, or 800,000 carrier bags, were used, depending on the yardstick...