Your recycled plastic may end up reinforcing roads. Here’s how.

The plastics you’ve recycled may have ended up in at a state park in Pennsylvania. Or at a whiskey distillery in Kentucky. Or even in Hawaii.

That’s all thanks to an emerging practice of transforming waste plastics into tiny beads used to strengthen materials like asphalt and concrete. The products are already reinforcing roads and parking lots throughout Iowa. You may have driven over them yourself without even knowing.

Gary Beeman, an Iowa State University engineering graduate, is the chief executive officer of New Village Initiative — what he calls the “mothership” that several companies fall under. One of those companies is the NVI Advanced Materials Group, which is focused on reducing waste while improving infrastructure.

About 10 years ago, the group started researching cheaper alternatives to traditional construction materials. They zeroed in on the ever-growing mountains of discarded plastics.

“It's surprising how much plastic we use on a daily basis. Everywhere you go, there's waste plastic,” Beeman said. “The job then becomes, what do we do with it?”

The company sources plastics from all over the country, including Iowa’s waste streams. They’re sent to two manufacturing plants: one in Tipton and one in North Carolina. There, they undergo a transformation.

The plastics are sorted, cleaned and processed. Some are melted down and combined with other ingredients. Others are ground up and blended with additives.

“It depends what we’re using them for,” Beeman said. “They’ll use the same waste plastic base, but they need to be in a different form to perform their function.”

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The resulting product — small plastic beads — are then mixed into asphalt or concrete at the plants and sent off to job sites. The beads change the chemistry of the materials, making them bind together better to form stronger surfaces. In concrete, they also provide insulation and a moisture barrier that can lower the cost of construction when used in housing.

Roads with these plastic beads last twice as long as those without, Beeman said. That means less maintenance and repairs are needed over a road’s lifetime, saving costs, time and energy. Every pound of repurposed waste plastic also saves a pound of carbon-dioxide emissions that would’ve been produced by making new plastic for the reinforcement product.

“We have an unlimited permanent supply of waste plastic, and it gets bigger every year, unfortunately,” he said. “Even if we collect it, we need to do something with it rather than bury it. And this is a productive use.”

Over seven years, the Tipton factory has manufactured millions of pounds of these plastic beads, Beeman said. They’re now in millions of tons of asphalt around the country.

Much of the company’s initial work took place in asphalt roads in Iowa. They’re hidden in stretches of county, state and federal highways. They’ve been mixed into parking lots for major companies like Amazon and Apple. In Des Moines, the Advanced Materials Group has used more than 60 million water bottles worth of plastic in projects within the last six years.

The company’s work stretches far beyond Iowa. It’s currently processing plastic from Hawaii’s beaches and fishing nets to repurpose back into roads on the islands. On another site, it’s helping a company to recover their plastic waste stream, turn it into beads and use it in their roads and parking lots.

“Pretty much anywhere you see asphalt we've probably done that type of project” in Iowa, Beeman said. “We're just now working more on the concrete side. That's relatively new, but we want to have an impact on the affordable housing in Iowa as well, because that's a chronic problem and just keeps growing.”

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Shane Fetters, the lead technician of the Iowa Department of Transportation’s District 1 in central Iowa, said his team integrated the plastic beads into pilot projects on two highly trafficked roads in Des Moines. They left the beads out of one section — the control section — to see how the product affected the asphalt.

Seven years later, Fetters said, you can see a difference in the roads with beads compared to those without them.

“The plastic beads seem to help structure-wise. There are areas of the road that are distressed where we didn't use the beads, and there are areas that are not distressed using the beads,” he said. That means less road maintenance for his teams to conduct, which means less taxpayer money is used. “So yeah, there's definitely a benefit.”

The Iowa DOT would like to investigate longer-term effects before implementing more of the plastic beads in District 1 roads, Fetters said.

“We’ll do our research and keep an eye on it,” he said. “The great thing about it is we’re saving landfills by recycling. ... That’s a great thing.”

Brittney J. Miller is the Energy & Environment Reporter for The Gazette and a corps member with Report for America, a national service program that places journalists in local newsrooms to report on under-covered issues.

Comments: (319) 398-8370; brittney.miller@thegazette.com