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from the what-happens-when-you-drink-and-drive dept.
The Netherlands could become the first country to pave its streets with plastic bottles after Rotterdam city council said it was considering piloting a new type of road surface touted by its creators as a greener alternative to asphalt.
The construction firm VolkerWessels unveiled plans on Friday for a surface made entirely from recycled plastic, which it said required less maintenance than asphalt and could withstand greater extremes of temperature– between -40C and 80C. Roads could be laid in a matter of weeks rather than months and last about three times as long, it claimed.
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The plastic roads are lighter, reducing the load on the ground, and hollow, making it easier to install cables and utility pipelines below the surface.Sections can be prefabricated in a factory and transported to where they are needed, reducing on-site construction, while the shorter construction time and low maintenance will mean less congestion caused by roadworks. Lighter materials can also be transported more efficiently.
Can plastic really last that long, exposed to loads and UV? I've had the plastic cases of electronics literally crumble to dust because they were sitting next to sunny windows...
Original Submission
(Score: 3, Interesting) by gallondr00nk on Saturday July 11 2015, @12:06PM
They havn't even built it yet? I sometimes wonder if these sort of articles are barely concealed attempts to hoover up investor capital.
It seems like one of those technologies that we'll never hear from again when, having done some rudimentary testing, they discover it does things like crumble after a year of sunlight exposure, or provides absolutely no traction in the wet.
It'd be nice, just once, if these ideas came to fruition.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Runaway1956 on Saturday July 11 2015, @02:04PM
Uh-huh - "Mars said the PlasticRoad project was still at the conceptual stage"
I might want to hear more after the road has been driven on for a few years. And, no, I don't want to hear about a scenic little road going around a park, with "No Trucks" signs posted. Put this thing in an industrial area, and let the trucks hammer the shit out of it. Some railroad grade crossings should be included in the mix. Lots of side streets, too. Hell, just choose an entire industrial zone, and do the whole thing in plastic. If it stands the test of time there, then it's good for anything I can think of.
(Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Saturday July 11 2015, @09:32PM
Trucks, sure, but railroad grade crossings? What's the point of that? Trains don't drive on roads, they ride on steel tracks. The asphalt road stops at the tracks, and while it may fill in the gap between the tracks somewhat, the train never rides on it at all.
Side streets are somewhat pointless too, because they don't get much traffic of any kind, especially trucks. The industrial zone would be the real "hell's kitchen" test area, because of the heavy trucks. If a road can handle 80,000 pound semis, then it can handle cars. The other place is should be tested is an automotive test track, the kind the automakers use for their field testing. Then you can see how well it does with wet roads, turns, hairpin curves, etc. You don't want to test that out on real roads first, because if someone's car flies off the road in a turn due to poor adhesion between their tires and the experimental road surface, they'll sue.
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Saturday July 11 2015, @09:54PM
You should stop one day at a grade crossing. Examine the road surface within about 30 feet of the steel tracks. Macadam, blacktop, and other pliable surfaces generally show a LOT of wear at the grade crossings. Concrete seems to hide that wear better, until it finally suddenly fails, and you find several independent slabs floating on each side of the crossing. To some extent, I think this is due to the train's weight on the supporting roadbed as it crosses. To a greater extent, heavy trucks crossing the tracks hammer that section of roadway. Automotive traffic also hammers that road surface, but I believe the cars only cause a fraction of the damage that trains and trucks do.
I watched a road crew doing something unusual a few years ago - they tore up the road surface, and put down huge rubber mats on either side fo the tracks. Rubber, or some kind of semi-rigid plastic, something black, anyway. At the time, I expected those mats to last for a long, long time. But, apparently, it was only a temporary fix, because within the year, they tore up those mats and resurfaced the roadway again.
I guess that I should point out that I live in a temperate region, where we can expect hard freezes. That's about the only factor I can think of that might contribute to that wear, that some other Soylentils might not see.
(Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Tuesday July 14 2015, @11:00PM
It's probably mainly because of the train's weight: it flexes the rails and the roadbed underneath; asphalt is slightly pliable, but not that much, especially after it gets old, so it fails there faster than other places.