COMPANY PROFILE - BY SANDRA DICK
Drastic plastic remedy to melt ocean waste deluge
IN the 1820s, Scottish engineer John Macadam came up with a revolutionary idea to remake roads with a layer of crushed stone, gravel and a camber to help ensure the rain could be whisked away.
Nearly 100 years later English inventor Edgar Hooley came up with an improvement – mechanically mixed tar and aggregate on the surface, pressed hard by a steamroller.
Roads the world over have stayed pretty much the same ever since. Until, that is, a school class assembly and a six-year-old’s devastatingly succinct response to a simple question.
“The teacher asked the kids to name what is in the ocean. Some said fi sh, whales, dolphins. My daughter put her hand and said ‘plastic bottles’,” said Toby McCartney, CEO and co-founder of Scottish start-up MacRebur.
“I thought how I didn’t want my little girl growing up in a world where that’s the case.
“By the time she is the age I am now – I’m 40 – it’s expected there will be more plastic in the oceans than fi sh. I wanted to do something about that.”
The result is an idea which is creating interest all around the world and which could transform not just the way we reuse previously unrecyclable plastic, but also dramatically improve the roads we drive on.
Thanks in part to a little girl’s school assembly response, the roads of the future may well be made with plastic.
“I knew there was a problem with potholes in India, and that they were taking waste from landfi ll sites and shoving it in a hole in the road then setting it on fi re so it would melt and fi ll in the hole,” explained Toby.
“I didn’t think the local council would think too much of me doing that, but I wondered if there was any way of doing something similar,” he added.
The former telecoms engineer turned
entrepreneur hooked up with civil engineer Gordon Reid and former council waste and recycling offi cer Nick Burnett, to come up with a solution that has propelled the idea into a business which has already exceeded investment expectations, and can count tennis ace Sir Andy Murray among the backers.
The result is small pellets derived from waste plastic, which are added to asphalt road mix in place of bitumen. Roads are now 60 per cent stronger and ten times longer lasting than usual, which don’t crack in freezing conditions and don’t melt when under the hottest summer sun.
It would appear to be a win-win situation; handling the prickly issue of what to do with the mountains of waste plastics we produce every year, plus solving the problem of pot-holed roads struggling to cope with today’s volume of traffi c.
“We can’t say exactly how we make the pellets – that’s our secret,” said Toby, “But it’s 100 per cent waste, and all the stuff that currently can’t be recycled and would be destined for landfi ll. “
The company's other products, MR8 and MR10, are the result of a slightly diff erent mix of polymers: designed for eff ectiveness
In keeping with their environmentally aware ethos, MacRebur tries to source the plastic it needs for their products from the areas where they are destined to be used, working with local authorities to identify a waste stream which could be developed into one of their three polymer-based products.
And, of course, with landfi ll tax an issue for businesses and authorities, it often pays for them to have MacRebur step in.
The fi rm now has three sites around the UK - at Dumfries in south west Scotland, Cumbria, and another in Wales, where the waste is separated, cleaned and the process of turning them into pellets gets underway.
The fi rm’s fi rst product, MR6, was 18 months in the development process which included nail-biting laboratory tests to ensure it would stand up to the demands of a typical busy road. In fact, it proved it was better, stronger, longer lasting and could work out cheaper than
12 SHM March, 2018 using traditional materials.
The company's other products, MR8 and MR10, are the result of a slightly diff erent mix of polymers, each one designed to bring additional eff ectiveness to the road depending on the conditions.
The pellets are then sold to asphalt manufacturers, to be mixed to the asphalt on location.
“We’re the only ones in the world doing this,” continued Toby. “Everything is patented, so no one else will be able to do this, and get the results that we have. “
So it’s perhaps little wonder that the business beat 20,000 other applicants to win the prestigious Virgin Voom start-up competition in 2016 and a £50,000 prize.
They then followed that up with a seed funding push aimed at raising £590,000, which actually raised £1.3m from more than 1,000 investors in a week.
Since then there have been two years of trials, with MacRebur’s plastic pellets added to asphalt used for roads from Cumbria down to Gloucester, in far fl ung places such as Bahrain and Abu Dhabi. By April, MacRebur products will also be used for roads in Australia.
Closer to home, MacRebur’s innovative solution has recently been used to top a major thoroughfare in the London Borough of Enfi eld.
This poses one of the product’s toughest challenges, as the section of Green
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