Skip to main content

United Kingdom testing durable roads made of recycled plastic

MacRebur
Despite the fact that road vehicles have changed enormously over the past 70 years — in both quality and quantity — the roads they drive on have advanced surprisingly little.

U.K. entrepreneur and engineer Toby McCartney has been working to change that, courtesy of technology that allows for the creation of high quality road asphalt out of recycled plastic waste. With the innovative tech, he now wants to use discarded plastic from landfills to transform millions of kilometers of roads around the world.

“We take waste plastic that is destined for landfill sites and recycle it,” McCartney told Digital Trends. “What we’re able to do is to take this plastic that has been thrown away, and use a special formula to clean it off, create pellets using it, and then use those pellets to add to a mixture of rocks and bitumen to make longer-lasting roads.”

So far, the scheme has won the approval of Virgin founder Sir Richard Branson, and McCartney’s company MacRebur has gotten the support of two local governments in England to start using its MR6 product to build their roads.

Image used with permission by copyright holder

McCartney describes the technology as a “real win-win across the industry.” It lessens the reliance on fossil fuels due to the reduction in oil that needs to be used as part of the formulation, helps cut down on waste plastic going to landfill, and improves the streets we drive on. The plastic-based road asphalt made by MacRebur is 60 percent tougher than standard asphalt. By tweaking the recipe, the surface can also be modified for different environments.

In addition, it saves money for all involved. Companies that sell the waste plastic to McCartney save money by not being taxed for sending material to landfill. Local governments save money because they get a longer-lasting road which needs less maintenance. Drivers save money because they’re driving on better roads, with fewer potholes. And McCartney and his colleagues save money because, well, they’re being paid for their work.

Next up, he says the plan is to expand to new countries — although he noted that this must be done the right way.

“Something we’re very conscious of is that we’re still classed as a startup,” McCartney said. “We don’t want to grow too quickly, because we want the infrastructure in place to produce our pellets. We’re aware of dealing with over-demand, which would leave us unable to fulfill orders. As a result, we’re being very careful in selecting the countries that we’re expanding into.”

Editors' Recommendations

Luke Dormehl
I'm a UK-based tech writer covering Cool Tech at Digital Trends. I've also written for Fast Company, Wired, the Guardian…
This AI cloned my voice using just three minutes of audio
acapela group voice cloning ad

There's a scene in Mission Impossible 3 that you might recall. In it, our hero Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise) tackles the movie's villain, holds him at gunpoint, and forces him to read a bizarre series of sentences aloud.

"The pleasure of Busby's company is what I most enjoy," he reluctantly reads. "He put a tack on Miss Yancy's chair, and she called him a horrible boy. At the end of the month, he was flinging two kittens across the width of the room ..."

Read more
Digital Trends’ Top Tech of CES 2023 Awards
Best of CES 2023 Awards Our Top Tech from the Show Feature

Let there be no doubt: CES isn’t just alive in 2023; it’s thriving. Take one glance at the taxi gridlock outside the Las Vegas Convention Center and it’s evident that two quiet COVID years didn’t kill the world’s desire for an overcrowded in-person tech extravaganza -- they just built up a ravenous demand.

From VR to AI, eVTOLs and QD-OLED, the acronyms were flying and fresh technologies populated every corner of the show floor, and even the parking lot. So naturally, we poked, prodded, and tried on everything we could. They weren’t all revolutionary. But they didn’t have to be. We’ve watched enough waves of “game-changing” technologies that never quite arrive to know that sometimes it’s the little tweaks that really count.

Read more
Digital Trends’ Tech For Change CES 2023 Awards
Digital Trends CES 2023 Tech For Change Award Winners Feature

CES is more than just a neon-drenched show-and-tell session for the world’s biggest tech manufacturers. More and more, it’s also a place where companies showcase innovations that could truly make the world a better place — and at CES 2023, this type of tech was on full display. We saw everything from accessibility-minded PS5 controllers to pedal-powered smart desks. But of all the amazing innovations on display this year, these three impressed us the most:

Samsung's Relumino Mode
Across the globe, roughly 300 million people suffer from moderate to severe vision loss, and generally speaking, most TVs don’t take that into account. So in an effort to make television more accessible and enjoyable for those millions of people suffering from impaired vision, Samsung is adding a new picture mode to many of its new TVs.
[CES 2023] Relumino Mode: Innovation for every need | Samsung
Relumino Mode, as it’s called, works by adding a bunch of different visual filters to the picture simultaneously. Outlines of people and objects on screen are highlighted, the contrast and brightness of the overall picture are cranked up, and extra sharpness is applied to everything. The resulting video would likely look strange to people with normal vision, but for folks with low vision, it should look clearer and closer to "normal" than it otherwise would.
Excitingly, since Relumino Mode is ultimately just a clever software trick, this technology could theoretically be pushed out via a software update and installed on millions of existing Samsung TVs -- not just new and recently purchased ones.

Read more