The road to a world with less plastic waste could come in the form of, wait for it, new roads. Dow Chemical, one of the world’s largest plastic producers, has started building roads using a combination of asphalt and plastic waste. In the past month, the company has constructed two private roads at its facility in Texas using 1,7000 pounds of recycled plastic, or the equivalent weight of 120,000 plastic grocery bags. This is the first time the company has built roads using plastic waste in the US, but not in other places in the world: in 2017, the company helped two Indian cities develop roads from more than 100 tons of recycled plastic. Perhaps you might be thinking that roads made from this material might break apart easily, but that’s not the case. According to one Dutch construction company, recycled plastic roads could last at least 50 years or around three times longer than conventional roads.
Roads are being built using tons of recycled plastic waste
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