MacRebur is an innovative company that has gained the attention of people worldwide for their efforts to counter plastic pollution.
The company has been converting plastic waste into roads.
The story of the company as depicted on their website goes like this: “The idea was born when our CEO, Toby McCartney, was working in Southern India with a charity helping people who work on landfill sites as ‘pickers.’
“Their job is to gather potentially reusable items and sell them to be turned from rubbish into something useful again.
“Some of the waste plastics retrieved by the pickers were put into potholes, diesel poured all over them, and the rubbish set alight until the plastics melted into the craters to form a makeshift plastic pothole filler.”
Toby, however, knew that the policymakers and environmental regulatory agencies in the UK won’t be happy with the idea of incinerating diesel and plastic.
So, the genius man came up with a way around this problem.
Toby gathered his friends Nick Burnett and Gordon Reid to create the company MacRebur in April 2016. They chose the name based on parts from the surnames of all of them.
After that, the company started looking for environmentally sustainable ideas of converting plastic waste to something that could be used as a binder in asphalt paved roads.
They now collect plastic from domestic and commercial wastes.
Sixty per cent of their plastic supply comes from commercial sources whereas the rest is sourced from domestic waste.
After collecting the waste, they pass it through a machine called granulator which converts it to tiny pieces with a maximum size of 5mm.
Explaining the details of the process, the website says: “Next, the plastic granules are mixed with our activator—it’s this that makes the plastic bind properly into our roads.
“Our activator is patented and what’s in it is a secret! This blend of plastic granules and the activator—let’s call it the MacRebur mix—then goes to an asphalt producer.”
Normally, the asphalt used to make the top surface of roads is made of bitumen and stones.
The technology MacRebur uses aims at reducing the amount of bitumen used to make the asphalt, which in turn decreases the use of fossil fuels, as bitumen is a byproduct of fractional distillations of crude oil.
“We can do this because we are turning the plastic into its original oil-based state and binding it to the stone with the help of our activator,” the company explained.
The procedure this company uses maintains the temperature at a limit where there is no chance of microplastics escaping and polluting the atmosphere.
“Well, making asphalt requires heat—usually around 180°C,” the website explained.
“We make sure that all the plastic we use melts at a temperature lower than this—around 120°C—so it homogenizes properly without creating microplastics.
“It’s for this reason that we can’t use all plastic waste but we can use most things, including black plastic, which is difficult to recycle.”
In an interview with CNN, the CEO of MacRebur established that their roads happen to be 60 per cent stronger than traditional asphalt roads.
He said: “We went through about five to six hundred different designs of different polymers that we were mixing in before we found one that actually worked, at the end of the day, plastic is a great product.
“It lasts for long, which is a problem if it’s a waste product, but not a problem if we want it to last.”
Replaced!