We all know there is a problem with plastic pollution. Five trillion plastic bags are used every year. One million plastic drinking bottles are bought every minute.
What if we could use plastic waste to build roads? This is exactly what Toby McCartney has done.
In 2019, McCartney's UK-based company, MacRebur, built the world's first plastic road in Elgin town, Scotland. The plastic waste was made into grains and then mixed with bitumen (沥青). The road looks just like any other road. But it has improved strength and is more stretchy (有弹性的) thanks to the plastic.
"Our technology can not only help solve the problem of plastic waste but also produce roads that deal better with changes in the weather, reducing cracks and holes on the roads," McCartney told the BBC.
McCartney's idea came from a trip to India. "I saw people in India would put plastic waste into the holes on the roads and burn it. The plastic would melt down and cover the hole," said McCartney.
"I knew that there must be some similarities between the plastic and bitumen, which both come from oil. That's how I started to think about mixing them," he said.
After lots of testing, McCartney found the perfect recipe. And now his company has built many plastic roads around the world, from Australia to Europe. A one-kilometer stretch of roads uses about 684,000 plastic bottles or 1.8 million plastic bags. The road itself can be recycled at the end of its lifetime. The materials can be reused to build new roads.
"We're just a small part of ending the plastic problems, but it's nice to be part of it," McCartney said. "I just don't want my daughters to live in a world where there are more plastics in our oceans than fish."
