KSHB 41 reporter Grant Stephens covers stories involving downtown Kansas City, Missouri up to North Kansas City. Share your story idea with Grant.
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A Kansas City pilot program is working to eliminate waste by using recycled plastics in asphalt mixes.
It's a method researchers say makes the roads stronger and cheaper in the long run.
The program uses items most people use but perhaps wouldn't like to think about where they end up when they're done — plastic bags and used tires.
Olivia English, founder of Live Green USA, helped bring paving companies, researchers and the city to the table to make the pilot program happen.
“Some of the hardest things to recycle right now are plastic and tires. You’ll find they’re really just sitting in the ocean or sitting in landfills," she said. "We’re creating a market for these materials to be recycled at the end of the day. We’re increasing the longevity of these roads because rubber and plastic are very complimentary with asphalt mix designs and reducing the cracking and rutting.
"... When it increases the life of the road, it actually reduces the cost overall of maintenance. There’s less potholes, there’s less cracking.”
She said researchers at the University of Missouri have been testing adding small amounts of recycled plastic and finely ground rubber from tires into asphalt mixes for decades.
English held up an example of what's mixed in, a handful of small multicolored plastic pellets.
“These are plastic bags that have been shredded, heated up, and pelletized," she said. “They call them nurdles.”
Roads paved with the mix turn out stronger and last longer than normal roads.
The test road crews paved is in a neighborhood in south KC.
The mix was made with 0.5% of recycled material, but that still amounts to about 100,000 plastic bags that would have otherwise ended up in a landfill.
“There are just so many wins here, so much potential for us," said Brian Platt, KC's city manager. “It’s an amazing and bold and innovative solution to two of our biggest problems: maintaining infrastructure and landfills.”
It's a pilot program now, but if the newly paved roads stand the test of time, the method could be expanded and used in future road pavement.
"There's two goals here. One is to open up markets for innovation in waste materials. We need more recycling facilities here in the United States, especially here in Kansas City," English said. "We need to open up a market to allow for that. And two, to bring awareness to the everyday person that when they're recycling, there's value in the material that they're tossing."
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