Huh? Roads made out of Plastic?

America's roads suck. They're in terrible condition and most of the time they're being torn up by road crews just when we need to get somewhere else. The government says it'll cost 100 billion dollars every year just to maintain our current road system, much less upgrade it.

Meanwhile, there's something else you might have noticed in the environmental news lately, that we humans have been dumping plastic trash into our oceans for about half a century now and it's actually been piling up. Big time.

Researchers say that around 15% to 40% of our plastic litter goes directly into the oceans each year. That works out to from 4 million to 12 million metric tons of the stuff every single year, enough to cover every foot of coastline on the planet.  And what's worse, scientists don't even know where about 99% of the ocean plastic debris is actually winding up, meaning that it's probably having a godawful effect on marine life and eventually our own food supplies. Plus, they say the annual amount of this junk is probably going to double over the next 10 years.

Yup, we are doomed.

Unless, of course, somebody comes up with a solution. And that's what a Dutch construction company called VolkerWessels wants to do. They've gotten together with the city of Rotterdam to take that same plastic waste and pull it out of the ocean to make, are you ready? Plastic roads!

If the idea works, these roads would be durable, quick to construct, and work a lot better than good old Arabian oil-based asphalt, because they are supposed to last three times longer than conventional roads.

Of course they'll be more expensive, but if they last three times longer, make utility access easier, can be built off-site and then can be installed quicker, these plastic roads might actually turn out to be cheaper in the long run.

The next step is to build a few and test them in the laboratory to make sure they work in wet and slippery conditions, etc. The city of Rotterdam has embraced the idea wholeheartedly and is ready to help put together a pilot project.

The company is planning to install one of the roads in Rotterdam’s street laboratory, and as soon as it's shown to be workable, we may be seeing the solution to one of our problems coming from fixing another one of our problems. How neat is that? Sometimes the human race may actually not be as stupid as everybody else thinks we are!