The city Department of Transportation will soon be paving more roads with recycled asphalt.
Half of the asphalt mixed by DOT paving crews will be made up of salvaged older roadway, the department announced Wednesday.
“Expanding the use of recycled road material in our asphalt production will not only cut costs, it will also cut emissions,” Transportation Commissioner Ydanis Rodriguez said in a statement. “It’s a win for us, a win for New Yorkers, and a win for the planet.”
Before a road is repaved, work crews break up and remove the old asphalt. The chunks of old road are then trucked to one of the city’s two asphalt plants, where they are broken down and mixed in with fresh asphalt.
The department’s asphalt is already 40% recycled, a DOT spokesman told the Daily News. Moving to a half-recycled mix could keep as much as 200 tons of material a day out of landfills, according to a department analysis.
It will also reduce cost, officials said, as the city will have to buy less quarried stone per mile paved.
City crews have already paved more than 6 lane-miles of roadway in Brooklyn with the new mix, and will monitor the durability of the roads, the DOT said in a statement.
