on the surface of it this looks like any other Road this is the a 68 at Toft hill near Bishop Auckland it's being relayed using a new type of asphalt that contains this plastic waste and this is the material you saw in that small plastic bottle the base is half a ton of this stuff and it's small ground down bits of plastic the kind of plastic that is quite tricky to recycle so what kind of things am I talking about well it could be a plastic bottle it could be the type of plastic you find
on a ready meal this black single-use plastic is particularly tricky to recycle it could be the kind of packaging that comes around a slab of meat and it could also be the bag that you use from the supermarket to carrier all home in all this broken down into this and used as parts of our road surface this is where the plastics added to the other ingredients that make the material that resurfaces the road is mixed and heated and then loaded onto lorries it's the only place where this happens in the region at the moment but
in the future that could change as we produce more and more we get it onto more and more lured schemes and we look at doing further development testing with the material we'd like to think an end idea that you know from what we're putting at the moment which is it a very steep amount is that we could actually sort of move up forward so we actually put in more plastic into and interesting to those lorries end up on resurfacing projects like the one near Bishop Auckland an area where the new plastic mix is being child
we're confident it should perform at least as well as traditional asphalt surfaces so absolutely and of course a new road surface as well should be immune from potholes for quite a long period of time they also use it here the a 6/8 9/8 edge field this bit of road took six and a half tons of plastic the same as 60,000 plastic shopping bags in the UK we recycle somewhere around about 50% of that worldwide it's a lot lower than that so the resources that waste plastic is absolutely massive this is a great source of one
opportunity for us to use some of that weight Westwego county durham hope they're now paving the way putting plastic rubbish into miles of new roads Amy Lee ITV News
