Asphalt used on road surfaces are byproducts from fossil fuel. With the ultimate goal of eliminating the use of fossil fuel to combat climate change, are there any good alternatives for road surfaces? I don’t think I’ve ever heard of a viable replacement of asphalt in the works, or even a plan to replace it in any environmental discussions before. At least, not enough for me to notice.
Extented question would be: what are some products derived from fossil fuel that are used in everyday life, but still lack viable alternatives you don’t see enough discussions about?
Hmm. Well, the obvious choice would be some kind of tar. Someone mentioned that oil extraction is not as bad if you don’t burn it, too. What about a plastic blend?
Extended question: One thing I think of is all the various chemical building blocks that go into synthetic things, like drugs. As I understand it, right now we pull up crude, and then repeatedly process it until we’ve split it into 1000s of individual component molecules. Pick a chemical, go to the “production” section of the Wikipedia, click on a component and repeat; you’ll probably find one.
There’s approaches to making individual building blocks green ways, but I don’t think there’s a fallback for cases where a specific commodity chemical has no alternative. What we really need is a way to make a similar blend of things from pyrolysis of biomass. I assume somebody is working on it.
Roads wear. Plastic dust getting spread everywhere is probably a bad thing.
That’s true, but AFAIK asphalt roads don’t tend to produce a fine dust (rather, the tires and mufflers do), so there should be some kind of plastic resin that would wear a similar way.
Then we’ve got big chunks of plastic everywhere.
Trouble is that kind of gradual wear pretty much guarantees the material is coming off in tiny chunks that are basically dust.
Hmm. Usually when I see roads break, it’s more of a disintegration into chunks situation. I really though I watched a video where they vacuumed up dust from alongside a road.
If microplastics are going to be made, that is kind of an issue. Maybe it’s still worth it, or maybe we have to pick an alternative. I guess worst case we could just go to all gravel roads, and it would be slow but you would get there.
That’s a great solution actually, you should de-emphasize cars and put in more trains and infrastructure for local individualized personal vehicles like bikes, ebikes, electric scooters, and even pedestrians.
Aren’t bike paths usually asphalt too? They definitely are where I live.
Rail would work I guess, and mass transit is better than personal cars for any number of reasons, but we’d have to put in a lot of rail and abandon all the significant road infrastructure built up. I’ve mostly stanned buses in the past for that reason.
They can be anything, even asphalt. Concrete, gravel, dirt.
Bikes won’t wear asphalt or anything else as fast as a high speed multi ton vehicle will though.