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Podcast: Engineering Matters
Episode: #27 Recycling Plastic into Roads
Description: After 844 trial tests, and setting his own street on fire,
founder of Scottish start-up MacRebur Toby McCartney finally hit on a viable
solution for repairing potholes. His idea sought to resurface roads using recycled
plastics, and the result is a form of polymer modification of asphalt that uses
a mixture of waste plastics and additives to create an alternative to bitumen. Bitumen
is the sticky, fossil fuel derived substance that binds together the aggregates
that surface our roads, and although Toby’s new business can’t eliminate it, it
can replace a proportion of it, lowering the road’s carbon...