Blacktop Roads About to Get Greener

Signs of American progress on the green front are enormously encouraging. We may be way behind many other developed nations, but we’re slowly awakening from our Bush-induced idiot coma. One such sign is that we’re starting to clean up the process of laying down roads.

Wired’s Autopia blog has it:

There are more than 4 million miles of paved road in the United States, and 93 percent of them are covered in asphalt. Unless you’re backpacking in the wilds of Alaska or wandering the bayous of Louisiana, you are never more than 22 miles from a stretch of blacktop.

That’s a lot of asphalt, and a lot of energy needed to produce it - which is why Hussain Bahia wants to find a greener way to make the stuff. He’s a civil engineering professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and he says anything that increases asphalt’s recycled material content or cuts the energy needed to lay it down will have a big impact on the environment - and our pocketbooks.

“This is a no-brainer,” says Bahia, who has been studying asphalt for more than 20 years. “If any person involved in managing our infrastructure looks at the data, why would you spend more energy and money on something else?”

Bahia is part of a $5 million research program called the Asphalt Research Consortium, which hopes to, among other things, make blacktop more ecologically sustainable. One of his first goals is to develop “cold-mix” asphalts that require significantly less energy than conventional asphalt to apply.

Sure, it’s more economics than environmental concerns that’s spurring the change, but we’ll take it regardless! There is no reason why we can’t green up our roads, and it’s another baby step toward sustainability. Next we’d like to see more hybrid or electric public buses on those roads instead of cars… and bike lanes… and a national rapid transit system… but let’s not get ahead of ourselves, eh?

Link [Wired]
Photo credit: Wikimedia Commons

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