Plastics Road lives up to its name as Dow debuts new...

Plastics Road at Dow Chemical’s Lake Jackson campus is now, perhaps, the most plastic road in America. If it holds up, drivers could find themselves rolling atop discarded shopping bags in no time — and with little notice.

As a test of its own polymer resin, the company repaved about 2,600 feet of the two-lane road around one of its newest polyethylene plastic manufacturing plants using an asphalt mix that includes post-consumer recycled plastic. It is a first for the company in North America, and one of the widest uses of recycled plastic for a roadway in the nation.

“It is creating a new use for something that needs to be recycled,” said Jeff Wooster, global sustainability director for Dow Packaging and Specialty Plastics.

Using the plastic in the roadway keeps it from findings its way to landfills.

Drivers should not expect to cruise along roads made of old food wrappers and H-E-B bags just yet. Still, Dow officials and other researchers said there is growing interest in adding used plastic to the recipe for roads, provided these first tests pan out.

“We need to two to three years to give you the answers, but everyone is looking at it,” said Sahadat Hossain, director of the Solid Waste Institute for Sustainability at the University of Texas at Arlington.

Crews paved Plastics Road and Gulfstream Road around the Dow facility in early January, using 1,686 pounds of low-density polyethylene plastic — the equivalent of 120,000 plastic grocery bags — along with rock and minerals bound together by the asphalt, a viscous mixture made mostly of petroleum that hardens.

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The roads are on Dow’s private land, unreachable by anyone without company permission at the closely-guarded chemical complex tucked between Texas 288 and the Brazos River.

Besides, anyone looking close for the difference between the polymer modified asphalt and plain ol’ blacktop would be disappointed.

Though the amount of plastic is small compared to the other materials, it opens the possibility of more plastic in more roads worldwide, something already common in China, Malaysia and southeast Asian countries that deal with a glut of used plastic.

Dow already has used recyclable plastic to pave roads in 2017 in Indonesia, followed by tests in India and Thailand. The ongoing tests could lead to more widespread use, giving new options for using plastic while helping Dow market polymers it makes to help the plastic bond with the asphalt.

“We do expect quite a large amount of materials to be used in places like India, which is building roads at such as a rapid pace,” Wooster said.

Going with plastic on Plastics Road is a feat that came about as much by chance as it did choice.

“Honestly, we chose Freeport because we needed to build a road there,” Wooster said.

The street was named Plastics Road — to go along with other Dow demarcations such as Chlorine Road and Zinc Road — long before the polymer asphalt mix was proposed.

During construction of Plant 5, which coincidentally turns out the plastic pellets that find their way into food-storage plastic and shopping bags like the ones mixed into the asphalt, heavy equipment did a number to the new roads.

“This is the way employees drive to come into work at the plant,” said Weipeng “Weber” Ng, operations manager for the plant, who oversaw the paving project. “Everyone was sick of the potholes.”

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Officials in September sought out their own scientists for options repaving the roads, and crews laid the asphalt on Jan. 7.

So far, it has held up to heavy Gulf Coast rains, some frigid temperatures and Texas’ increasing humidity and daily highs.

Deeming it a success will take many more seasons and more testing to make sure the roads hold up under heavy vehicles in all sorts of weather conditions and temperatures. Dow officials plan to repave with the same mix a parking lot at the chemical giant’s Midland, Mich., headquarters 100 miles north of Detroit — seasonally about as far from Freeport as a place can get.

Experts said the potential payoff will be enormous in the United States if the pavement proves it can meet specifications with American transportation officials.

The big success will be solving the plastic problem, Hossain said.

“We have a material that can be used for roadways that used to be expensive but is now cheap,” he said.

For years, the world’s used plastic found its way to China where the government’s rapid expansion of roads and other infrastructure meant a robust market. China has built hundreds of miles of road out of new materials, and India has mixed recycled plastic into roads for years.

Part of the reason other countries are ahead of the United States is officials have rigid rules for accepting new materials for use in roads. Often, standards set by the federal government filter to all states, which in turn govern the specifics of roads locally. The testing and development by a handful of companies working nationally on inserting plastic into pothole patching or general paving is headed toward widespread adoption, Hossain said.

“If the policymakers act quickly, this could be mainstream within two or three years,” he said.

Acceptance of plastic for a road base comes at a crucial time, environmentally and economically. As China has scaled back the importation of recycled plastic, the world is swimming in used food wrappers and grocery bags, and does not want it ending up in landfills or the ocean. Used plastic churned into pellets or a mealy sand-like substance also is readily available at low prices.

Asphalt is a ready-made remedy for where some of that material can go, Hossain said. To place one inch of asphalt atop a two-lane roadbed for about a mile, crews need about 1.2 million pounds of asphalt-ready mix.

Replacing just a fraction of that rock and mineral with plastic diverts millions of pounds that otherwise would fill landfills.

“We have a limited amount of raw materials on this planet and we need to make a more circular economy,” Wooster said.

dug.begley@chron.com

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