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recycled road material
July 31, 2020

Building rubble combines with tire waste for recycled road material

A team of engineers in Australia has come up with a new recipe for a road construction material that draws on two huge sources of waste; discarded tires and building rubble. The blended material was shown to offer the strength and flexibility required to handle heavy traffic, while being made from entirely recycled products.

The work was carried out by engineering researchers at Melbourne’s RMIT University, who point to the monumental amount of waste generated by construction, renovation and demolition practices around the world as motivation, along with the billions of scrap tires that are discarded annually.

Building rubble that is crushed and processed can be repurposed as a building material called recycled concrete aggregate (RCA). This can then be integrated with other building materials to lessen their environmental footprint, or find special use in areas such as drainage or filtering applications.

Another area where RCA can carry some of the load is in road construction. More specifically, as the base layer that sits above the subgrade and sub-base layers and below the asphalt on top. The RMIT team was experimenting with additives that could improve its performance in this area, and through its experiments found that crumb rubber taken from scrap tires fits the bill nicely.

Keep reading on NewAtlas.com