Plastic Roadways BUSTED!

the plastic road it's simple efficient low-cost and easier to construct it's sustainable contributes to a circular economy is lightweight and easy to repair absolutely it is all benefits on this islami the highways also hollow and which allows cables and pipes to easily pass through it at the end we fabricated as well it's a road that has many advantages over existing products and that contributes to solving some important global problems yeah and they're talking about a lifespan of this material well once it's being put into a zone being tripled so this means of course far fewer and the shorter road maintenance is exactly what I mean this is cool like in my mind I don't have an engineer's mind I know how it works in terms of getting the plastic into the road but to make a road solid enough a lot of plastic will probably be needed so that let's lock up a lot of plastic Atlantic the elements are designed with a hollow space which can be used for drainage of excess water making the road flood proof this space can also be used for cables and piping it's a revolution in how we build roads things I don't know what you think about these in a lot of times that we live in plastic roads man can you imagine a stick roadways what a brilliant idea with over 50 million hits on Facebook which means it must be an absolutely wonderful idea and that must be why people keep asking me just how great this idea is so it's basically solar roadways but without the solar panels I bury you know environmentally conscious good because solar roadways use as much recycled material in their production as possible like recycling plastic instead of burning it or putting it in landfills together with wave and and cacao they will recycle plastic waste into lightweight prefabricated hollow elements replace the panel at a time if damaged or malfunction a damaged element is easily replaced and can then be refurbished or recycled into a new element plus the roadways have two channels that form what's called a cable corridor that runs concurrently with the roadways to sell one part houses electrical cables meaning power lines data lines fiber optics and high-speed Internet the other channel captures in the filters stormwater and melted snow moving them out into a treatment facility or three on site greatly decreasing the amount of pollution that enters our soil lakes rivers and ocean the elements are designed with a hollow space which can be used for drainage of excess water making the road flood proof this space can also be used for cables and piping I'm going to make it out of waste plastic material by some incuriously undescribed process represented here by some computer graphics they're going to be modular which means they'll be easy to repair and super quick to build roads and of course they have these conduit running along underneath them so you just put a rope down wherever you want right well jeez where to start first no a road is a lot more than just the surface if you want to build a road you have to do a little more than just slap down some asphalt on a muddy Hill the line share of the time and cost of building a road is leveling and straightening the route and a lot of building the foundation and after that you want a durable waterproof surface that is grippy in all conditions and that coating is pretty much just that the coating the road surface so it's difficult to see that seeing is this is just the surface that you're worried about here that there are going to be great time savings in actually building roads here so that's the first thing is even if plastics had a superb properties for building roads out of it's kind of difficult to get too excited about this is the majority of the road construction is going to be exactly the same then of course there's the minor problem plastics like glass really doesn't have great properties for making road surfaces album I mean let's just drop immediately this let's make it out of recycled stuff and cut to the core of the matter which is can you make any decent road surface out of plastic well there are many problems most notably each too soft actually let's take a little step back here Plastics is a blanket term used to describe almost many organic polymeric stuff in this case they seem to imply they're going to use polyethylene terephthalate which is most commonly used in pop bottles it's only an implication from the no because they don't say what plastic they're going to use anywhere now polyethylene terephthalate eat a great polymer with some great properties it's very strong and attention indeed your typical pop bottle will take about ten atmospheres of pressure before failing which is very impressive however for a road building material each dumb on several fronts most notably it's too soft please lean terephthalic has a hardness comparable to gold and gold even scratch or dent with your teeth okay so there are some player flying terephthalate from a pop bottle and mm-hmm a little bit later and you have nice little teeth mark Annette just give you an idea of how soft this stuff is and just I wasn't bluffing about the gold and gold and there you should find there is and I sort of taste mark previously there wasn't one and the same you can do with this plastic put that on a road and you get any dirt or mineral material on the road whatsoever and the abrasion of that dirt between the car and the road will destroy the road at an impressive rate I mean let me just give you a little demonstration here of rubbing some standard blacktop against a polyethylene terephthalate bottle for less than 10 seconds okay so there's just a piece of regular pop bottle so what I'm going to do now is I'm just going to give it 10 seconds operation with simple act up early and that's 10 seconds which as you can see that's it this is just like rubbing with your hands this is not like cars running over as a sanding aggression whatever and even at that is made an absolute mess of their classic a close-up of this so yeah I mean that is just the sort of mesh that TIFF incisions are brazen did to a pop bottle now that's what ten seconds abrasion does just imagine what you years of car driving or the stuff is going to do just on this alone the material they are proposing to use is wholly unsuitable for building roads out and that even if that wasn't the case polyethylene terephthalate expands way too much to be a good Road building material it's thermal expansion is almost five times that of concrete and ten times as much as the granitic type materials the rock that is typically used to give a road surface its durability and plastics like polyethylene terephthalate rot in ultraviolet light sunlight that's another fast process but it does fundamentally change the properties of the plastic which is really not something you want from a road sir and there is no sensible way to prevent that sunlight aging yeah Pech properties a less-than-stellar and what the hell deal with this creating a cavity into the road the elements are designed with a hollow space which can be used for drainage of excess water making the road flood proof I mean that's really just making a rod for your own back I mean for what they're going to let water go through it what weight these things can have expansion joints all the way down it right so what's that water just going to go through and wash away the foundations of the expansion joints or something well the shore let's take a look at their web page and see how they intend to join up these modules there are various ways to connect the prefabricated parts further research will have to reveal which method is most suitable the choice also depends on the final optimal design but does about you but that answered all of my questions yes or the animation makes it look ladies drop them in well then you have no idea whatsoever how this would actually work in practice or is the point of having this abridged bar structure suspension I mean this is one of the reason why this design is dumb is you have the entire weight of the cars born on this tiny fraction of the road service so that that'll tiny surface there get stress aids a lot more than it would if it was born out over the whole surface and for what game any flexing of the road surface that the car is required to do or basically increase it roller system and this is meant to take all of the loadings from people on foot to trucks and for what so you can put some tiny cables down one side of the road so one really did watch too many solar roadways videos didn't that possible plus the roadways have two channels that form what's called a cable corridor that runs concurrently with the roadways to sell one part houses electrical cables meaning power lines data lines fiber optics and high-speed Internet the other channel captures in the filters storm water and melted snow moving them either to a treatment facility or treating them on-site greatly decreasing the amount of pollution that enters our soil lakes rivers and ocean and we all know how that turned out you know with a grand unveiling where this idea that was going to revolutionize road construction all over the world and what do we get some crappy paved area that took no vehicles whatsoever I was closed less than a month after it opened because it had already fail yeah it might be a little bit relevant the road building skills avea saw a roadway team quite progress to the level yet of lane 30 or so previous clubs in a-level fashion or getting working drainage on it or simple craftsmanship but there are still folks out there if you think the fact that I can't even please a patio sized pedestrian area is completely irrelevant these are the genes minds who have thought about road buildings so much that they're going to completely revolutionize road construction these wonderful intelligent people want to begin manufacturing a technology that can power the future of the whole freaking planet you need to know how this technology you need to get behind it you need to share with everyone you know this is actually happening well that is all I've done you say spend hundreds of thousands of dollars to get an illuminated disco pool in the middle of their town square and still three months later it hasn't reopened ah people who promise the world and spend millions of dollars to deliver a joke it's a revolution in how we build Rhodes look fellas what not just have this as your plastic road oh yeah that's right because then you can have the power line running down the edge of the road but this design of course means that whenever you take that panel out you disrupt the power and water supply and every other supply that's actually going down underneath the road every time you do road maintenance by the way the mere fact they don't tell you what plastic they're going to use means that these are aspirational not implementation level goals but somehow they think that this is going to last three times longer than a regular Road service all adding up to a prolonged life expectancy of the plastic Road well based on what exactly based on manhole covers made from composite materials you know fiberglass reinforced plastic do not melt it down pop bottles well you just make a fiberglass reinforced composite material Road well sure just optimistically it would double the price and on top of that you would lose the ability to recycle it because you can't recycle it once is fibre reinforced so let's take a quick look at what we currently use to coat roads ash valve it's basically a mix of rock with five percent of the black goopy evil stuff left after you distill all the useful stuff of crude oil that's bitumen so this road surface is a composite material the rock provides a hard durable surface and it's stuck together with bitumen which provides a little elasticity to the composite waterproofing and makes the surface grippy Rock is pretty dense stuff it's about 3 to 4 grams per cubic centimeter which is about three times as dense as plastic now they used up as a selling point that their road is going to be lightweight its sustainable contributes to a circular economy is lightweight and easy to repair into lightweight prefabricated hollow elements this means compared to conventional roads less heavy equipment is needed to deliver and construct plastic roads making the ecological footprint a much smaller one but that's really not a selling point I mean my estimate is those tiles weigh about half a tongue eat and there is no obvious way in which those tiles are bonded to the road Foundation which means if you were to try and stop a car at say 70 miles an hour a hundred kilometers an hour or something on that it may just rip up the road service because no obvious way in which the road surface is attached to the foundation not it's not even conceived on at this point but let's just save the sake of argument that there was a plastic not a composite material just a plastic that was hard and durable there isn't but it's same for sake of argument that there was and that it had great durable traction properties when wet it doesn't but let's just say for sake of argument that he did and let's say for sake of argument that you could make it out of a waste plastic you can't but don't weigh too much about the details how about the cost well plastic you typically about $1 per kilo or $1000 per ton and if you get it recycled it's maybe half of that which is good news because that's about the same cost as bitumen but of course a road surface is only about 5% bitumen factoring lead the aggregate you know that you rock you ground up in the blacktop and the total cost of the road surface is about $100 per ton and that ready to Hugh's which is already half the price of just the raw materials for the recycled plastic so this road surface is off to a roaring start being about five times more expensive than regular blacktop which brings us to another key point is it actually worth recycling plastic together with wave and enter account they will recycle plastic waste or just burning these things as fuel I mean big picture type stuff man crane currently uses about 4 billion tons of oil per year about 1/10 of a billion tons gets turned into Asheville that's 140th or about 2% of our oil base materials a comparable amount gets turned into plastics and turning that oil into plastic takes quite a lot of energy itself indeed it takes about much energy to burn a kilo of crude oil as make a kilo of plastic which kind of means that if you burn the plastic at the end you get the energy back for making your plastic so you could just think of this as if you took two model and rather than burning it directly you turned it into plastic used it until the end of its life and then you burned it and got the energy back in energy terms the plastic is free now sure I has a carbon footprint of approximately its weight in oil so perspective time a 2-liter soda bottle weighs about 50 grams so two of them weigh about 100 grams which is about the same carbon footprint is driving about a kilometre or half mile 500 yards that's the length of five football season just shy of half a mile which ballpark numbers means that your typical us commuter who spends about half an hour getting to work and half that getting back which you know all in is about a gallon of gas has a carbon footprint about 100 times greater than a single two-liter pop bottle and that's just for their daily commute further asphalt is actually one of the most trivially recyclable materials on the planet we're up to 99% of asphalt already being recycled all you have to do is break it off the road heat it up melt the bitumen again and you can resurface roads with it and what was one of the key selling points a plastic road oh that it was recyclable like recycling plastic instead of burning it or putting it in landfill yes congratulations you've made a roof surface that does exactly what the existing road surface does but hey maybe this would work if rather than just coating the road with plastic like this they they made a composite material not a fiber composite and loeb rock seems to have fairly good properties for a making road out of that is that it's cheap hard and durable maybe we just need some link goopy and viscous and sticky to bride a waterproofing surface and because you're only coating an aggregate you will need about five percent of the goopy stuff I met maybe some sort of oil-based material and voila a brand-new Road coating now you might say that's tight and sounds rather familiar and you know what you'd be right sure it won't be nice and light any more practical way almost one regular route service does because basically what you're describing is a traditional road surface just you're using a polymeric stuff as a binder rather than beating it how I know there will be some who say this is over sixty million views on Facebook well over a million shares I mean should I can't just be describing a a regular road with a different binder and now let's let's consult our frequently asked questions and see what we can find out when plastic roads be too smooth to provide traction of itself plastic is not stiff enough however in road construction asphalt we have a lot of knowledge and experience in dealing with a lack of stiffness we can use this knowledge to make the plastic Road stiffener we will first investigate whether we can make the plastic stiff enough if it's not possible we could also add sand or crushed stone to the surface of the plastic road by pressing or printing to provide the required stiffness in fact it's when you get to stuff like that in a frequently asked questions that you realize just what a half-baked idea this was from a real Road building engineering company I mean really just reach the point above this how feasible is it to actually produce plastic roads kws infra believes in the feasibility of the idea and we are making substantial investment in further research into the plastic road her research will have to reveal whether the idea is feasible in practice not really what comes across in your video guys it's the plastic road kws found a way to give plastic waste and new and durable life no not really you haven't found anything nothing at all you hope that a way can be found the plastic road it's simple efficient low-cost and easier to construct it's sustainable contributes to a circular economy is lightweight and easy to repair and may not be feasible it's a revolution in how we build roads absolutely it is all benefits on this as well me the highways also hollow and which allows cables and plants to easily pass through it again prefabricated as well it's a road that has many advantages over existing products and there contributes to solving some important global problems yeah and they're talking about a life span of this material well once it's been put into roads home being tripled so this means of course far fewer and the shorter road maintenance is exactly yep just like we know how to eat news and all native facts we now have fake science spread on places like Facebook by folks who liked what they heard but didn't really care enough if it was true to check it out well project witches I am the one who checks and one last final nail in the coffin if you take a look at the world's bateman production it's about a hundred million tons per year 120 knots of the thing and let's see the pass a key argument that all goes in to road construction now let's take a look at the world polyethylene terephthalate production which is about 25 million tons per year isn't recycled polyethylene terephthalate that world production meaning that screws recycling crap even if it was super cool to make road out of polyethylene terephthalate they just isn't enough of the stuff in the world yeah bottom line any presentation had limits itself to mid-range computer-generated animations is almost certainly going to be and in this case mind blown the optimistic you know where we don't really know how we're going to join them together or or what plastic we're going to use or how we're going to actually make the road surface durable but that didn't stop it from getting over 60 million hits on facebook thank you yeah I don't know what you think about these in a lot of times that we live in plastic roads man can you imagine it [Music] [Music] you

Channel: Thunderf00t

Views: 1,845,884

Rating: 4.8247805 out of 5

Keywords: plastic, roads, gigadget, facebook, recycled, road, solar, scam, bullshit, pwned, busted, phil mason, thunderf00t, gold, polymer, polyethylene terephthalate, polyethylene, terephthalate, new, gadget, revolution, revolutionary, amazing, fail

Id: Sj_FZduqblo

Length: 23min 37sec (1417 seconds)

Published: Tue Feb 14 2017

Reddit Comments

[u/GldNvgtr]

Found this related to the plastic recycling process: http://tce.edu/chemistry/process.html It's just a mix with regular tar, maybe to increase volume and make it cheaper.

[u/theoldboiler]

No road is perfectly flat and straight either.... so... what happens when you have to go up hills or turn slightly to the right and then slightly down? You'd need specific panels for every random incline or decline or turn.... this is mind-bogglingly stupid.