New York has created its first public roads made by using waste plastic thanks to innovative technology developed in Dumfriesshire.
The city’s department of transportation is running trials with materials produced by Lockerbie-based MacRebur.
The company, named after founders Toby McCartney, Gordon Reid and Nick Burnett, has developed a way of turning plastic waste into roads and car parks.
And it has been working on a four month trial on two roads on Staten Island in New York.
If successful it could see the company’s product used in future projects in the Big Apple.
Roddy McEwen, international business officer at MacRebur, said: “Whilst trial sections such as these typically take up to three years from start to finish, we have worked together with the team at NYC DOT to begin trials within just four months – with a long-term view of utilising local waste for local roads in New York City.”
The company uses plastic destined for landfill or incineration and turns it into granules to be mixed with a secret formula activator to bind it.
It is then bagged ready to be distributed to asphalt producers for use on roads.
The additive allows the bitumen used in the production of asphalt to be extended and enhanced, reducing the amount of fossil fuel used.
In the first stages of a trial across the Atlantic, over four days MacRebur and NYC DOT worked with City Asphalt to lay four different types of asphalt mix.
The first contained traditional asphalt and the remaining three each consisted of a mix with a percentage of the Lockerbie firm’s waste plastic additive.
The trial roads will now be tested and monitored to measure performance against traditional asphalt by Dr Thomas Bennert at Rutgers University – one of the leading US universities in asphalt research and testing, with results expected before the end of the year.
The new eco-friendly surfaces are said to have diverted the equivalent weight of 214,534 single-use plastic bottles from landfill.
Ydanis Rodriguez, NYC DOT commissioner, said: “We are excited to partner with MacRebur on this promising pilot and look forward to monitoring how its asphalt mix performs in New York City weather.
The technology invented by MacRebur, which opened a factory in Lockerbie in 2019, has been used in roads across the UK and as far afield as Canada, New Zealand, Australia, Saudi Arabia and South Africa.
