by Sahadat Hossain, an engineering professor at the University of Texas at Arlington, and his students intend to alter the world one road at a time.
In order to enhance roads and recycle plastic that would have otherwise been thrown away, Hossain and his colleagues have been creating an asphalt mix that incorporates plastic.
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According to Hossain, we discovered that adding plastic to an asphalt road increases its durability. There is less cracking and rutting. Additionally, the performance is far superior.
The crew used a mixture of asphalt and shredded plastic to repair the top two inches of a portion of Rockwall’s North Goliad Street this spring. Texas’s first roadway to be paved with the special asphalt is this one. The crew mixed the asphalt over the course of one night, delivered it to the location, and completed the job by six in the morning.
This effort is nothing new to Hossain, who also serves as the director of UTA’s Solid Waste Institute for Sustainability.
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He visited the Dallas district of the Texas Department of Transportation in 2019 and requested that they do a feasibility assessment. He was given the all-clear to navigate the asphalt after completing a few tests.
In 2023, Hossain and his students patched a mile of the UTA campus’s first plastic-infused road over two parking lots. According to doctoral student Ishraq Faruk, the project required about 3.5 tons of plastic garbage to finish.
According to him, that’s nearly equivalent to fifteen garbage trucks’ worth of plastics.
About 3.5 tons of plastic were utilized in the 3,500-foot Rockwall road segment.
More than five tons of discarded plastics would have been used if we had built a mile-long road, which is a significant diversion from landfills, according to Faruk.
According to Hossain, plastic bags are hazardous as they cannot be recycled. He recalls being struck by a plastic bag while driving on Highway 157 near a dump in Arlington.
He claimed that no one makes an effort to recycle them. All of them are returned to the dump. We managed to repurpose that single-use plastic bag.
In the upcoming years, Hossain and his group intend to extend the pilot to additional Texas roadways while continuing to watch the Rockwall road.
They will be working on a road project in Fort Worth in the fall.
According to him, other states typically follow Texas because of TXDOT’s size and the success of any projects completed there. We will not confine ourselves to Texas. We intend to grow across the country.
The project may lead to a more sustainable future, according to the Texas Department of Transportation.
In a statement, TxDOT deputy executive director Brian Barth stated, “This is taking one problem, which is plastic filling up our landfills, and using it to solve another problem, which is providing longer-lasting roads.”
In Dahka, Bangladesh, Hossain and his pupils have also constructed roads. A number of his students worked on and managed the project for a few months.
According to Hossain, the outcomes of our monitoring of the Dhaka plastic road and the UTA parking lot are outstanding. We had no problems at all after two years.
Organizations have contacted out from as far afield as Saudi Arabia, Nigeria, and Ethiopia.
According to student and team member Garima Maharjan, “I think what we’re doing here is, you know, we’re integrating engineering innovation with sustainability.” Additionally, sustainability is typically overlooked when discussing advancements, so combining the two is fantastic, and I’m happy to be a part of it.
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