DATE: June 22, 1998
CONTACT: Taylor Eighmy
603-862-1381
WRITER:Suki Casanave
603-862-3102
CONGRESSIONAL APPROVAL MAKES UNIVERSITY OF NEW HAMPSHIRE NATION'S ONLY CENTER FOR RECYCLED PAVEMENT RESEARCH
At the University of New Hampshire, tons of waste is about to hit the road, beginning a new and useful life as pavement in the country's highways.
With recent approval of the federal Highway Bill, UNH will receive $9 million in funding over the next six years to establish a national <"http://www.rmrc.unh.edu/AboutTheCenter/Abouthecenter.asp">Recycled Materials Resource Center--the only site in the country for trash transformation of this kind. Blast furnace slags, mine tailings, contaminated soils, scrap tires, glass, plastic--more than 4.5 billion pounds of industrial waste are generated each year in the United States. All of it has potential to be transformed into paving material, easing the strain on landfills and preserving valuable natural resources typically used in road construction.
The challenge, of course, is that little is known about what works. How do you test various materials without building an actual road--and possibly having it fail in some dramatic and expensive way? Remember the Northwest highway built with recycled tires that made national headlines several years ago when it caught fire? More recently US 20 in Iowa had to be entirely re-paved when the concrete, constructed with a waste material, broke into pieces after only 10 years, and a precast bridge in Texas was rejected before it was even put in place!
"Everyone's concerned about what might happen in terms of performance--both from a physical and an environmental point of view," says Taylor Eighmy, director of the new center. "Recycled roads make people nervous, but they have tremendous potential to save natural resources and money." Which is precisely why the center was founded.
UNH leads a consortium of institutions that constitute this center, including the US Army Cold Regions Research and Engineering Laboratory (CRREL) in Hanover, Rutgers University, Cornell University, and the University of Rhode Island. "Our consortium is eager to serve as a recycled materials resource center for the nation," says Eighmy. "No one's doing it on the scale we're proposing."
The center will concentrate on proving the new materials sound in terms of performance, as well as environmental safety. "Every waste producer in the country eyes the nation's highways as linear landfills," says David Gress, professor of civil engineering. "You need to be able to predict what would happen over the life of highway--which can be well over 30 years."
Accelerated aging tests will be conducted at Cornell, where concrete samples will be sent to the humidity chambers for 200 days at 70 degrees centigrade, aging the materials in an accelerated process that is equivalent to 10 years at 20 degrees centigrade.
Freeze-thaw tests will then be performed at CRREL, where pavement samples will be put through an accelerated expanding, thawing, and contracting cycle that condenses 10 years into six or 10 days.
UNH will then subject pavement samples to accelerated testing to simulate years of traffic, as well as the effect of freezing and thawing, wetting and drying, carbonation, and acid rain. In one test, six hours of pressure and pounding in a giant Instron machine will replicate the stress created by 10 years of heavy truck traffic.
Along with devising systematic testing and evaluation methods, the new center will develop appropriate national recycling standards for the recycling process. "We're excited by the prospect of becoming the national recycling resource center for transportation programs," says Donald Sundberg, UNH's vice president for research and public service. "As a country, we need to find responsible ways to encourage greater recycling, but we have to make sure it's done in a way that ensures performance without increasing costs. The center will make this possible."
"This center will be an excellent resource for our entire nation," says Senator Bob Smith (R-NH), a senior member of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee who was instrumental in creating the Center. "By methodically addressing legitimate concerns, it will create sound ways to use materials now being discarded as waste."
"The center will give decision makers the solid information they need to evaluate new opportunities for recycled materials," says Congressman Charles Bass (R-NH), a member of the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee who led efforts to fund the center. "This is the way to achieve widespread impact--by building public confidence in the long-term performance of roads containing more recycled materials."
Two years ago, Senator Gregg (R-NH) obtained an initial $2 million to launch the consortium by funding an initial round of recycling research projects now under way at UNH with FHWA funding.
For more information, contact Taylor Eighmy, director of the UNH Environmental Research Group at 603-862-2206.