County Road Work Boosts Recycling

Crew members from Benton County’s Road Department lay asphalt Wednesday on North Tillys Hill Road near Decatur. The county recently began using asphalt with recycled tires to pave roads.
Crew members from Benton County’s Road Department lay asphalt Wednesday on North Tillys Hill Road near Decatur. The county recently began using asphalt with recycled tires to pave roads.

BENTONVILLE — Benton County officials think they may solve a pair of problems by changing the way roads are paved.

The county began using a different asphalt mix Wednesday when paving work began on Tillys Hill Road, south of Arkansas 102 west of Centerton. The asphalt mix includes rubber recycled from old tires, so improving county roads can also help reduce old tires heading for landfills or roadside ditches.

“I think it’s a good idea,” Steve Curry, justice of the peace for District 11 and chairman of the Quorum Court’s Transportation Committee, said Wednesday. “Other states have been doing it for awhile now. It’s a good way to get old tires out of the landfills and maybe keep people from dumping them along our county roads.”

At A Glance

Road Work

Benton County is revising its road plan after heavy rain and flooding damaged roads and bridges. Officials have proposed taking the county’s share of the state sales tax for highways and infrastructure and increasing the paving work. Sarah Daniels, county comptroller, said the county expects to receive about $1.2 million a year from the tax.

Source: Staff Report

County Judge Bob Clinard said he’s seen estimates about 300 million tires are discarded every year in the U.S. and between 70 and 80 percent are recycled.

“That still leaves 60 million tires that are going into landfills,” Clinard said. “We need to take those 60 million tires and recycle them as well. Tires have a life of probably 400 years in landfills. Landfills should be reserved for things that are going to decompose over time.”

Asphalt is a thick, sticky, dark-brown mixture of petroleum tars used in paving, roofing, and waterproofing. Asphalt is produced as a byproduct in refining petroleum or is found in natural beds, according to the American Heritage Science Dictionary.

The cost of the asphalt mix using recycled tire rubber is roughly equivalent to the more common asphalt, Clinard said. The cost might come down if the state allowed contractors to use the recycled rubber mix on state projects, but the Arkansas Highway and Transportation Department has rejected that idea, he said.

“They use it a lot in Missouri, but the Arkansas Highway and Transportation Department does not allow this at all,” Clinard said. “They’re living in the past. I was told they tried this in like 1993 and they’ve researched it and don’t think it’s a good idea. If the state doesn’t put it in their job specs, the suppliers won’t produce it.”

Wright Asphalt, the company the county is working with, is headquartered in Houston and has offices in Missouri, Clinard said. The company specializes in products using rubber from recycled tires, he said.

Randy Ort, spokesman for the state Highway Department, said the recycled rubber asphalt had been used in Arkansas and was found to be inadequate. The volume of traffic on state highways, coupled with the higher speeds and heavier weight of the vehicles using those highways, was too much for the asphalt, Ort said.

“We did not have good success with it,” Ort said, but added it might serve well under different conditions.

“It’s not a bad technology,” Ort said. “I can see where it might work on county roads or in parking lots where traffic volumes may be lighter, speeds slower and vehicles not as heavy.”

Danny Straessle, also with the Highway Department, said the department uses asphalt that contains recycled roofing shingles discarded during the manufacturing process. Liquid asphalt from the shingles is recycled into the asphalt laid on the highways, Straessle said.

“We’re very much into the recycling aspect of it,” Straessle said. “If at sometime it can ever be shown to work for our purposes we’d be happy to look at the recycled tire product.”

Kurt Moore, justice of the peace for District 13, said the county has considered using recycled rubber products in the past, at one point even looking at buying a tire shredding machine.

“We were advised that it made asphalt more flexible and less prone to cracking,” Moore said. “On county roads being more flexible is probably a good thing since we don’t have the wherewithal to put down a really thick coat of asphalt or cement like the state does on the highways.”

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