BTN.com staff, November 14, 2014
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Perhaps it isn?t all that surprising that major breakthroughs in waste management are happening in New Jersey.
If you?re expecting a punchline here that involves Tony Soprano or the ?Garbage State,? you?ll be disappointed. The reasons have to do with population and geography rather than stereotypes about organized crime or serving as a dumping ground for New York and Philadelphia.
?We?re running out of landfill spaces,? said Thomas Nosker, a professor of material science and engineering at Rutgers University. ?New Jersey?s got the highest-density population [in the U.S.], about 8 million people in a very small land mass. That makes it so that there?s no place left to put garbage. So we have to recycle everything we can.?
And Nosker has helped pioneer new ways to reuse waste. He?s worked on creating processes to convert things like plastic bottles into building materials, which have been used in the construction of bridges in New Jersey - and beyond.
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?We?ve gotten smart about how to build a bridge,? he said. ?We built a road bridge in Scotland that?s 90 feet long and has three spans. And we built it in four days - start to finish.?
The ecological benefits are great, of course, but the advantages of repurposing trash for things like infrastructure improvements go beyond that, Nosker said. There?s also a major cost savings due to the uncomplicated, inexpensive construction involved and the durability of these bridges over long periods of time.
?The processes that we?ve developed to recycle these materials are very simple to understand,? Nosker said. ?And they work universally. The Army Corp of Engineers has said that they receive a 34-to-1 return on investment when they build a plastic bridge on one of their bases.?
?It?s better for the end user who actually drives over those bridges because they don?t take very long to build, and they?re not going to be out of service very long. They?re not going to have to be rebuilt every few years.?
Watch the video above to learn more.
By Brian Summerfield
