An amazing idea has come up by a Scottish company which could change the fate of our planet for the better.
They have re-purposed 20 tones of recycled plastic into pellets in order to lie as the road surface. This is like 6,000 bottles.
The Linkwood Steadings is in Elgin, Scotland, which is a housing development. They are newly developed “plastic roads” which are flexible, which make them more durable and hard-wearing.
The company behind this ingenious plan is MacRebur and they have mentioned that this plastic would all have gone straight to landfills or incineration. They have revealed how the idea came to in online.
“Our CEO Toby McCartney was working in Southern India with a charity helping people who work on landfill sites to gather potentially reusable items and sell them.
“He noticed that some of the waste plastics retrieved by the pickers were put into potholes and set alight until it melted to form a makeshift plastic pothole filler. It sparked an idea to use waste plastic in roads here.”
The way they manufacture the pellets is really fascinating.
“We take plastic waste collected from commercial and household use – the split is about 60 per cent commercial and 40 per cent household.
“We can use most types of plastic but it must be classed as waste – we don’t use recycled or new plastic.
“We then use a granulator to turn this into small pieces of no more than 5mm. Next, the plastic granules are mixed with our activator – it’s this that makes the plastic bind properly into our roads.”
“Our activator is patented and what’s in it is a secret! This blend of plastic granules and the activator – let’s call it the MacRebur mix – then goes to an asphalt producer.
“We make sure that all the plastic we use melts at a temperature lower than this – around 120°C – so it homogenises properly without creating microplastics. It’s for this reason that we can’t use all plastic waste but we can use most things, including black plastic which is difficult recycle.”
Even the rest of the world can jump on board too.