This Tuesday a team lead by a technical team from the University of Costa Rica’s National Laboratory of Structural Materials and Models (Lanamme) with the support of the Coca Cola company, the ALIARSE Foundation and the Municipality of Desamparados, presented their project “Green Asphalt” (Asfalto Verde), a new asphalt mix, unique in Latin America that includes within its components PET plastic from recycled bottles.

Even though other countries in the world such as India, England and Canada have already experimented with this technique, in Latin America Costa Rica is leading the way with unique components that would extend the useful life of the roads and become an alternative for environmental sustainability and the construction and repairing of roads.

“For some years now we have been working in the project Green Asphalts, which consists in taking a residue material and including it in the asphalt mix. After our research we confirmed that PET is quite noble and it even competes well with commercial products that are added to the asphalt mixes”, explained Jose Pablo Aguiar, Coordinator of the Materials and Asphalt Unit of the Transportation Infrastructure Program of Lanamme.

After multiple tests and studies, Lanamme was able to determine that the new mix with over 3% PET and with a formula that makes it unique in the world has a good performance, achieving an asphalt cover that is resistant to malformations, cracks and humidity, among other critical factors, which makes it stand out from other mixes in other countries.

1000 bottles are used for every ton of asphalt mix.

A first trial with “Green Asphalt” mix will be carried out in a 1 kilometer street in Desamparados, half of the street will be paved with Green Asphalt and the other half with regular asphalt. Quality control tests will be carried out in real conditions to validate the benefits of the investigation.