Texas tested a highway built with 4.5 tons of recycled plastic in 2025

Representative Image of plastic waste being transformed into road-building material for sustainable infrastructure (AI-generated image) On State Highway 205 in Rockwall, a suburb east of Dallas, engineers paved a 3,500-foot stretch of road using about 4.5 tons of recycled plastic mixed directly into the asphalt. The project, led by Sahadat Hossain, a civil engineering professor at the University of Texas at Arlington, replaces a portion of the petroleum-based bitumen that normally binds asphalt with melted plastic made from discarded bags, bottles and other everyday waste. After years of laboratory testing and smaller pavement trials, the May 2025 project brought the technology onto an active Texas highway. The team is now watching how the material performs under regular traffic, heavy vehicles and Texas heat. The idea is relatively simple: instead of sending difficult-to-recycle plastic to landfills or letting it escape into the environment, researchers want to give some of it another use while also reducing the amount of conventional petroleum-based binder needed to build roads.How researchers turn discarded plastic into road materialThe technology developed by Hossain's team is ...