How in Britain garbage from plastic bottles is turned into super-strong roads

When Scottish engineer Toby McCartney, having visited India, saw how the locals were melting empty plastic bottles to fill road pits with the resulting mass, an idea struck him. Now McCartney is the owner of a company that builds roads and highways out of used plastic!

MacRebur company from Scotland builds roads from recycled plastic, successfully replacing asphalt with it.

McCartney, in particular, saw how plastic bottles collected by "scavengers" were used in road works: Indian road workers filled holes in asphalt with molten plastic. So u McCartney had an idea.

However, McCartney understood that the idea of burning plastic by pouring diesel fuel on it, as in India, would not take root in Britain. He decided to develop a more environmentally friendly program for recycling used plastic into pavement material.

In April 2016, McCartney and his friends, Gordon Reed and Nick Burnett, founded MacRebur and began developing a formula for the future of pavement and recycling technology.

The development took more than one year. But now the production is running at full capacity.

The collected plastic bottles are passed through a granulator, which cuts them into crumbs up to 5 mm in size. Then the plastic crumbs are mixed with a patented activator, the formula of which the company keeps secret. As a result, a viscous asphalt-like mass is obtained, as a road surface that is not inferior in characteristics to asphalt.

Asphalt is made of stone and bitumen, but MacRebur technology replaces bitumen with a plastic mixture, which, in particular, helps to reduce the use of natural hydrocarbons.

This is what the raw material looks like.

Plastic turns into such crumbs in a crusher.

The new technology has another advantage: while bitumen melts at a temperature of 180 degrees Celsius, a plastic mixture of 120 degrees is enough to go into a homogeneous state.

According to McCartney, the roads from the new plastic mixture are 60% more durable than asphalt.

The company is confident that a great and glorious future awaits this development.

And here's how it looks in practice