A new pavement mixture made from recycled waste will help give Stadium Boulevard a facelift. The asphalt pavement, which incorporates polyethylene-based plastic waste such as grocery bags and drinking straws, is a product of the Mizzou Asphalt Pavement and Innovation Lab located in the MU College of Engineering. The pavement will be applied to a Stadium Boulevard between College Avenue and U.S. Highway 63. Mike Schupp, a district construction and materials engineer for the Missouri Department of Transportation, said they expect to start laying down the mixture on Aug. 19.
Schupp said the test strip will be monitored for several years to determine how it holds up under various weather conditions compared to more traditional pavement. In an MU news release, Bill Buttlar said a pavement overlay should last for at least a decade. Buttlar is the MU lab director and Glen Barton Chair in Flexible Pavements in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering. “According to our laboratory results, it should outperform the status quo,” Buttlar said about how the pavement mix will compare to the standard formula.
The test section will also include an area paved with a mixture made from chemically modified recycled ground scrap tire rubber. “We thought we’d put it side-by-side with the waste plastic, which is newer, to see how they work relatively,” Buttlar said. “And then we can study the overall sustainability of both solutions.”