“One word: plastics.” That’s the famous career advice from the movie The Graduate. A professor at UT Arlington must have gotten the same message, because 56 years later he’s making history by using plastics to repair and stabilize Texas roadways in the DFW area. Dr. Sahadat Hossain—a UTA civil engineering professor…
ARLINGTON, Texas — A civil engineering professor at the University of Texas at Arlington is using recycled and unrecycled plastic waste products to fill in cracks and reduce rutting in roads. Professor Sahadat Hossain received a nearly $950,000 grant from the Dallas district of TxDOT to implement the “plastic road” material…
A University of Texas at Arlington civil engineering professor is using both recycled and unrecycled plastic waste products to fill in surface cracks and reduce rutting in roads—the first use of what’s called “plastic road” material in Texas. Sahadat Hossain, UTA civil engineering professor and director of the UTA Solid…
In 2019, the North American waste management market reached $208 billion. Thanks to advancements in modern chemistry and support from municipal governments, landfills have seen astonishing financial success in recent years, raking in millions of dollars in profit. So how exactly are landfills turning a profit out of garbage and…
Even though source reduction, recycling, composting, and WTE are preferred choices of waste management, over 70% of solid waste is open dumped or landfilled globally. Typical landfills/dumpsites occupy large areas from several to hundreds of acres. A lack of available space, both in developed countries and major metropolitan cities in…
Dr. Sahadat Hossain and Dr. Warda Ashraf are combining their two areas of expertise – recycling and asphalt/concrete, respectively – to lead a feasibility study on building plastic roads, funded by the Texas Department of Transportation (TxDOT).
A civil engineering professor at The University of Texas at Arlington has received a two-year, $987,140 contract from the Texas Department of Transportation (TxDOT) to investigate the use of recycled plastic pins to repair deep-seated failures on embankments and the areas around highway bridges.
Hossain has used recycled plastic pins extensively to repair shallow slopes in TxDOT’s Dallas district. The pins are about 8-10 feet long and are driven into the slopes to provide stabilization, reducing costs by more than 50% when compared to conventional methods. In addition, the project, led by Sahadat Hossain,…
Some highways, however, experience slope failures deeper below the surface than the pins can reach. To repair these, Hossain is implementing a new technique where crews remove the soil about halfway to the location of the failure, insert rows of pins, then cover the area and insert more rows of…
Those plastic milk jugs and water bottles in your recycling bin could soon be used to make pavement for roads across Texas and beyond. Researchers at the University of Texas at Arlington are about halfway through a two-year study of how to use recycled plastic as road material. And, the…