New road construction often results in a lot of waste asphalt, until now. The Missouri Department of Transportation has been recycling a lot of that formerly wasted material.
The number of recycled material is staggering. MoDOT recycled 8,417,020,000 pounds of material the past five years.
“A large portion of that number is material that comes off the highway,” according to MoDOT Field Materials Engineer Joe Schroer.
MoDOT has recycled 4.86 billion pounds of reclaimed material in construction projects since 2005. It has recycled 3.56 billion pounds of industrial waste from mines, steel furnaces and power plants, plus shingles and tires the past five years.
All that recycled material must meet engineering standards.
“Make sure that we have a product that is as approximately as good or better than what the virgin materials would be,” says Schroer.
MoDOT has gone green for the past five years with last year being the greenest: more than two billion pounds of waste from construction projects was recycled. MoDOT also recycled more than six million pounds of waste material; paper, cardboard, aluminum, electronics.
