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EcoPortal.net · Nebraska City, NE

A 4,000 foot stretch of Nebraska city road got paved with asphalt carrying two million shredded plastic bags, and crews are watching how it survives winter

The old road outside South Sioux City used to be just gravel and cracked blacktop. Then a paving crew showed up with a mix nobody in Nebraska had ever poured before. Buried inside the steaming asphalt were the shredded remains of two million plastic bags. Nobody was pretending it was a finished product. It was a test, laid on a real road that real trucks actually use. So what does four thousand feet of melted grocery bags do to a road once winter arrives? Melted plastic film coats the rock instead of filling gaps The trick is not dumping plastic into asphalt like filler. Engineers used shredded low density polyethylene film, the kind used in grocery and trash bags, melted into the hot mix so that it coats the stone rather than sitting loose in the voids between it, alongside the sticky bitumen binder that holds a road together. Why that coating might help is still the part under study.