Comments by "Mat Broomfield" (@matbroomfield) on "Can plastic roads help save the planet? BBC News" video.

  1. That closing comment was pathetic. This seems to be an excellent way to repurpose waste. What the hell does it matter if it doesn't single-handedly save the planet? The planet can take on a multitude of ideas at the same time.
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  2. I wasn't aware road quality was measured on an absolute scale. I'm sure that compares to the jungles of South America, Ukraine's roads are a dream. All I know is when I go out on my motorcycle, there are so many potholes that going around roundabouts and corners is a real danger.
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  3. Roads will be built and repaired no matter what. If anything, they are repaired far too infrequently due to the cost. Would you sooner they be done using recycled plastic or with bitumen which means more oil extraction? Building roads out of plastic does not "encourage" anyone to build more. Nobody is sitting there thinking, "I'm in the mood for a10 million piece of essential infrastructure but I won't bother because it's not green enough". Getting planning permission for highways and even the smallest piece of footpath is extremely demanding and a clear need or benefit has to be demonstrated. This simply enables town planners to do so killing three birds (cost, recycling, construction) with a single stone.
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  4. But roads are already created using bitumen - a waste product from oil. Plastic is also made from oil. They already contaminate the environment. From the perspective of the water table, I'd be far more concerned about the emmissions from the vehicles ON the roads, than the incredibly minor decay of the roads themselves. Not an either or situation, but still.
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  5. Plastics are an oil product just as bitumen is. This is BETTER than bitumen because it utilises plastic waste that would only be dumped into the ground anyway. This way, the plastic is recycled at a lower cost to the public, no aditional bitumen is used, reducing CO2 emmissions, and the waste plastic is used on roads rather than dumped as waste.
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  6. Exactly the same as the bitumen ones.
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  7. @ Justin Wahid It's too expensive to take on multiple green projects at once? This was a privately funded operation, that REDUCED road costs to the government once it was completed. And you do know that there are already literally millions of green projects going on across the country at the same time don't you?
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  8. That's exactly how I read it too!
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  9. It's absolutely NOTHING like solar roadways. This simply uses plastic as a binding agent. The product you are referring to uses prefabricated sheets of "plastic" (a deliberately hyperbolic and misleading title from noted trash talker Phil Mason). And even then, it was not busted because the plastic composite was insufficiently durable, but for a plethora of other technical reasons to do with its deployment and effectness as an electricity generating product.
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  10. @ Justin Wahid Okay, but why is it the responsibilty of an entrepreneur in Scotland to consider environmental practices half a planet away before developing a product for use in Europe? He's doing his bit where he lives. He can't take responsibility for the whole planet.
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  11. "we will still always need and make roads- we've been doing it forever" precisely right!
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  12. The Alex Jones channel is over there - but be warned, even he admits everything he does is just a performance.
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