What if you use the plastic as a foundation or filler covered by a layer of asphalt?just curious if it’s possible to elongate the plastic tire interface and eliminate pulverization
This is the process described in the article. (Edit: the article even directly addresses this, with the suggestion, you can believe it or not, that this is intended to prevent microplastics generated from abrasion) I suppose you would still have to worry about, for example, what happens when you replace the road and recycle that asphalt - the asphalt with plastic admixture gets mixed into the whole batch and remelted. Assuming you kept track of which are the plastic roads you could still use the recycled asphalt (with more plastic waste?) as the base and use a layer of new asphalt on top, etc.
It may be that recycling your plastic is fully useless or even harmful, but there are municipalities where plastic in the recycled waste stream does get reprocessed into new products, and as one of the sibling comments notes, burying waste in a landfill isn't the obviously better solution either. It's also fine to have ire for the people who push plastic recycling for consumers without ensuring plastic waste gets into a stream where it's responsibly reprocessed. I'm sure there are some less-than-circumspect environmentalists who are responsible for this, but there are plenty of others, including politicians and industrialists who push recycling as a way to avoid reducing plastic consumption or to use still more single-use plastic items.
>> burying waste in a landfill isn't the obviously better solution either.
Plastics into landfill is better because the toxicity/microplastics are constrained to the immediate ecosystem of the landfill, rather than being distributed everywhere.
