I noticed that the road still appeared to be glistening. After some inquiry, I learned that my community allowed a contractor to use an asphalt mixture for the road construction called glassphalt. In making glassphalt, the glass is used to replace some of the sand that would otherwise be found in asphalt. After being very finely ground, glass from neighborhood recycling facilities is mixed into an asphalt mixture and becomes new road surfacing. This is very good news because instead of ending up in a landfill, disposed of glass is used to build roads.
Recycling is vital for our environment and for our pocketbooks.
Landfill space is becoming increasingly sparse, and thus more costly. By removing certain materials from our waste stream that would otherwise have been taken to landfills, we accomplish a lot of good things. Asphalt recycling represents another solution to our growing landfill problem. In fact, even before the current recycling trend, it was commonplace in the asphalt industry to recycle old pavement into brand-new roads. It is surprisingly easy to recycle old pavement.