When Jesse Kollmann (Civil Engineering Technology '08) was given the chance by NAIT to choose a location for an experimental, more environmentally sustainable pavement, the Strathcona County capital projects supervisor steered straight toward a busy arterial road.
"You might as well trial it by fire," he thought.
Or by tire. Kollmann's pick, Lakeland Drive, is an east-west connector linking residential areas with business parks and highways in northern Sherwood Park. It sees more than 17,700 vehicles daily, accounting for some of the hamlet's, and county's, densest traffic, about 2% of it being commercial and large vehicles. Kollmann himself drives it to work.
"So far, so good," he says. "Everybody's pretty surprised at how well it's performing."
That is, most drivers probably haven't noticed a difference on that nearly one-kilometre stretch since it was laid along the westbound lane in 2022. But the local landfill might have.
The new road is made using post-consumer, recycled plastic as part of an applied research project led by the polytechnic that, in a first for Alberta, has diverted the equivalent of 415,000 plastic bottles from the trash.
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