There’s a road in Chesterfield made of plastic bags.
Yeah, you read that right — Old Stage Road, which runs between Redwater Creek and the James River 20 minutes south of the city, is now the first “plastic road” in the state.
The VA Dept. of Transportation’s research team + MacRebur, a company based in the United Kingdom, teamed up to make it happen. MacRebur uses non-recyclable waste plastics — think plastic bags, 6-pack plastic, candy wrappers — in an asphalt mix to build longer-lasting roads + divert plastics from landfills.
At just under one mile long, the Old Stage Road resurfacing helped to keep the equivalent of 600,000 plastic bags away from landfills. According to the Center for Biological Diversity, it takes plastic bags 1,000 years to decompose in a landfill.
VDOT research scientist Dr. Jhony Habbouche said, “While the Virginia Transportation Research Council is being very careful and monitoring the potential impact of using recycled waste on the environment, we are looking to asphalt mixtures as a potentially viable product to incorporate some of the waste plastic commodity.”
MacRebur has laid over 1,000 miles of eco-road across the country, but this is its first venture in VA.
We want to know — can you see plastic roads in Richmond’s future? And if so, where? Share your thoughts.