Staten Island Home to First Waste Plastic Roads in New York

Staten Island is now home to the first public roads in New York to be created using waste plastic, following a partnership between New York City Department of Transportation and British waste plastic road company MacRebur.

The two roads, located on Rice Avenue and Royal Oak Road, form the first stages of a revolutionary trial that sees otherwise unrecyclable plastics re-engineered into a new, high-quality, sustainable polymer and given a new lease on life within asphalt mix in road construction.

The new eco-friendly surfaces have saved over 7,331 kilgrams of CO2e in comparison to traditional asphalt and diverted the equivalent weight of 214,534 single-use plastic bottles from landfill.

Taking place over four days, MacRebur and NYC DOT worked with asphalt producer City Asphalt to lay four different types of asphalt mix, using over 2,400 tons of hot mix asphalt.

While the first mix contains solely traditional asphalt, the remaining three each consist of asphalt mixed with a percentage of MacRebur’s waste plastic additive, which replaces part of the bitumen (fossil fuel) binder.

The trial sections will be tested and monitored to measure performance against traditional asphalt by Dr. Thomas Bennert at Rutgers University – one of the leading U.S. universities in asphalt research and testing.

Producing and laying 1.1 million tons of asphalt each year, NYC DOT is one of the United States’ leaders in using recycling asphalt pavement, and typically use 40% in every mix.

Ydanis Rodriguez, NYC DOT commissioner, said, “Using recycled plastic waste has the potential to solve our growing plastic waste problem and improve the quality of our streets by cutting carbon emissions and reducing potholes.”