Producing something useful out of waste materials that might rather be discarded is that the ideal scenario when it involves sustainable recycling. One place where we could put old tyres? Literally on the surface of the road.
Using a blend of old tyres and rubble left over from construction projects, a newly developed material has been found to be ready to take the pressures of traffic. It's actually more flexible than standard road materials, and thus less likely to crack.
The mix of recycled concrete aggregate (RCA) and tyre crumbs is suitable to be used as a base layer, beneath the asphalt laid on top. RCA is already utilized in this manner, but the addition of pieces of the tyre makes it even better ready to deal with the weather.
"Traditional road bases are manufactured from unsustainable virgin materials – quarried rock and natural sand," says technologist Mohammad Siberian Boroujeni from RMIT University in Australia.
"Our blended material may be a 100% recycled alternative that gives a replacement thanks to reuse tyre and building waste while performing strongly on key criteria like flexibility, strength, and permanent deformation."
Machines specifically designed to simulate the strains of a lifetime of passing vehicles were accustomed to testing different mixes of RCA, coarse tyre crumbs, and fine tyre crumbs.
Ultimately the researchers decided that 0.5 per cent fine crumb rubber to 99.5 per cent RCA was the sweet spot, maintaining the mandatory strength whilst also keeping the 2 materials cohesive. an excessive amount of rubber, and therefore the strength of the fabric began to decline.
The sooner we are able to put stuff like this to good use, the higher – the study authors note that 1 billion scrap tyres are produced annually across the globe, while construction, renovation and demolition waste accounts for 1/2 the world waste total annually.
"As we push towards a circular economy that may eliminate waste and support the continued use of resources, our recycled blend is that the right choice for better roads and a higher environment," says Boroujeni.
Waste tyres are usually dispatched to landfill sites or incinerated, releasing more CO2 into the air (something we actually can't afford to happen) and resulting in chemicals leaching into the environment and affecting human health.
(Saberian et al., Construction and Building Materials, 2020)
The good news is that things is being addressed: a greater proportion of tyres are now being recycled during a style of ways, a minimum of in some parts of the planet, and really often in creating construction materials (as is that the case with this study).
Variations on this mixture of materials have undergone testing for several years now by the team at RMIT University – let's hope it isn't too long before the fabric is used as a base layer for our roads.
"Solutions to our waste problems will come not only from reducing what quantity goes to landfill and increasing what quantity we recycle," says technologist Jie Li, from RMIT University.
"Developing new and innovative uses for our recycled materials is completely vital."
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