Recycled plastics will be mixed into Victorian roads at ten sites, with experts from RMIT University saying the project will demonstrate a viable circular-economy solution to the nation.

The RMIT-led project, supported by the Australian Research Council, Austroads and ten Victorian councils, will look to incorporate recycled plastic from consumer and industrial waste as a performance enhancer with the team also producing best-practice guidelines on the use of the plastics in the asphalt roads.

“These guidelines will enable local governments, which control 80% of the nation’s roads, to begin widescale adoption of this innovative recycling solution. If Australia’s 537 local governments each used a small amount of recycled plastic in the many roads they resurface each year, then nationally we’ll have created a large end-market for recycled plastic,” RMIT associate professor Filippo Giustozzi says.

“The ten project sites will use an estimated 21,000kg of recycled plastic, but the potential scale of this solution is considerable given the several hundred thousand kilometres of roads across Australia.”

With Australians generating 2.6 million tonnes of plastic waste each year and landfill space expected to reach capacity by 2025, this project is helping to address an urgent challenge. The City of Melbourne and nine suburban and regional councils will look to lead the way, each having sections of recycled road up to 900m long paved over the coming months.

Austroads chief executive Geoff Allan says there has been increasing interest in exploring the viability of repurposing recycled waste plastic with Austroads planning to investigate the most suitable types of plastics for use in roads.

“This project builds on the work completed last year that confirmed recycled plastics can be successfully incorporated in road infrastructure without detrimental effects on the environment, the health and safety of the workers or the future recyclability of plastic-modified asphalt,” he says.

“A major contribution of this project will be to develop evidence-based guidance that will provide certainty to road managers about the use of recycled plastics in road surfacing applications and thus lay the foundations for this solution to be embraced nationally.”

Along with Austroads, the collaboration includes Australia’s leading pavement authorities and specialists, including public works and building bodies, recyclers and contractors.

It will be coordinated under the ARC Industrial Transformation Research Hub for Transformation of Reclaimed Waste Resources to Engineered Materials and Solutions for a Circular Economy (TREMS).