Recycling Your Street Investment

Last year Bell County recycled 12 miles of road with cement.
“It worked out great,” said Bell County engineer Richard Macchi. The county has done small patching this year, but has many road projects yet to recycle in 2006.
Richard Schiller, Tarrant County Precinct 3 engineer, echoed Macchi’s satisfaction with cement recycling. Schiller provides maintenance service for his own Tarrant County precinct roads and for 13 cities in the precinct, Fort Worth being the largest. The city operates a multimillion dollar annual program to rehabilitate failed flexible streets and roads with cement.
One of the fastest growing pavement rehabilitation strategies for streets, roads and highways is recycling worn out pavements with cement. Failed asphalt pavements require rehabilitation to restore the ability of the pavement to carry traffic. A long-term solution for restoration is to recycle the asphalt and its existing base with portland cement, creating a new strong and durable base in which the aggregates are bound together with cement. A new wearing surface finishes the job.
Cement recycling allows the engineer to reuse the aggregates in the old base and asphalt surface while creating a long-lasting stabilized base. This reduces the cost of the construction by eliminating the removal of old material and replacing it. Reusing materials already owned by the county and city saves thousands of dollars annually.
Of the thousands of miles of streets, roads and highways that exist in Texas, there are many miles that are in need of replacement, repair or rehabilitation. Prime candidates for cement recycling in Texas and across the country are either unpaved or are made up of flexible base and a thin asphalt surface. It doesn’t take long for these marginally adequate roadways to wear out, their serviceability destroyed by traffic that is much too heavy for a thickness that is much too weak for the conditions.
According to The Road Information Program (TRIP), more than one-third of streets in major U.S. cities are rutted, uneven or packed with potholes. Texas fares a little better than the national average, but problem streets in Houston, Dallas, Austin and Fort Worth average about one-fourth of the cities’ street system. Using that percentage as a gauge, it is easy to see that county road systems would fare about the same