A Kansas City woman has found an innovative way to tackle her city’s trash problem: turn the trash into roads.
Landscaper Olivia English was struck by how much plastic waste she encountered at her job sites.
“Every job I went to, before we could start, it was picking up all of this trash,” she told Fox 4 Kansas City.
After researching solutions, English discovered that plastics could be used in road paving.
“Plastic is actually very complementary to road paving,” she said. “You can take a lot of waste out with just a small percentage of what you put into a road.”
To test the concept, English partnered with University of Missouri. Together they experimented on three sections of road in Kansas City, using ground tires in one, plastics in another and a mix of both in the third.
The asphalt mix was made with just 0.5% of recycled material, but that still amounted to about 100,000 plastic bags that would have otherwise ended up in a landfill.
The University of Missouri is monitoring the performance of the test roads using AI software. If they stand the test of time, English hopes her approach could become the gold standard (or maybe the green standard) for road construction.
Radon the road again
Florida is taking the concept of roads made of waste one step further.
In December, the EPA approved a pilot project in the Sunshine State that will allow a road to be built out of radioactive material.
Mosaic Fertilizer, the mastermind behind this project, will create the road out of phosphogypsum—a radioactive byproduct of fertilizer production.
The (glowing) green light from the EPA comes after Florida, the world’s top phosphogypsum waste producer, passed a law in 2023 to allow the project.
Phosphogypsum contains radium, which decays into radon gas—the same stuff we all panicked about in the ‘80s. The EPA, who was once firm on “no radioactive roads,” is now saying, “OK, but just this one. And maybe more later.”
Mosaic pitched the project as a win-win: they dispose of their hazardous waste while developing innovative new road construction techniques.
Critics like Ragan Whitlock, an attorney with the Center for Biological Diversity, are less enthusiastic, calling the EPA’s approval “mind-boggling.”
“That dramatically increases the potential for harm to our road crews and water quality,” Whitlock said in a written statement. “The EPA has bowed to political pressure from the phosphate industry and paved the way for this dangerous waste to be used in roads all over the country.”
However, Mosaic promises that Floridians won’t encounter the pilot road because it will be built on Mosaic’s own private property (presumably because nobody else wanted to live near a road that glows in the dark).
Dangerous cargo
Europe heard about Florida’s radioactive road and said, “Hold my beer.”
The European Organization for Nuclear Research, known as CERN, is planning to transport a container of antimatter across Europe by truck.
Antimatter is extremely rare and can only be created in high-energy particle accelerators, like those at CERN’s labs near Geneva, at a very high cost.
It’s also extremely dangerous. If antimatter contacts normal matter, both are annihilated, resulting in a powerful release of energy. In fact, just 1 gram of antimatter meeting 1 gram of matter would produce twice the energy of the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima.
Therefore, moving antimatter safely requires more than a “handle with care” sticker. CERN scientists have built special transportable devices equipped with superconducting magnets, cryogenic cooling systems and vacuum chambers where antiprotons can be trapped, avoiding contact with normal matter, that will be carried on seven-ton trucks.
CERN believes the potential scientific breakthroughs far outweigh the risks of transporting antimatter from their Geneva facility to precision labs across Europe.
“By moving them to a new location, we can make measurements that are 100 times more accurate,” Professor Stefan Ulmer, a scientist at CERN, told The Guardian.
Let’s just hope the driver doesn’t hit a pothole. RB
