Recycled Plastic Bridges

By: Charise G. Bollozos

The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers together with Marc Green, President of Axion International collaborated to build a bridge made of recycled plastic bottles and plastic car bumpers.

These bridges are mainly composed of detergent bottles and car bumpers and is said to be strong enough to hold up a 73 ton Abrams tank. The recycled bridge takes only a month to build and is more cost efficient than wooden bridges.

Although building a recycled plastic bridge may sound fun and easy, the whole process is complicated. The process will start by melting the plastic detergent bottles which will then produce polyethylene. Liquid polystyrene and fiber glass from car bumpers should then be mixed with the polyethylene in a hot tank and then the mixture is formed into whatever shape is needed.

The challenge here is that polyethylene and liquid polystyrene is like water and oil. They don’t mix. So to be able to get the mixture a special heating condition is needed and thus will make the plastic very strong, strong enough to hold a tank.

Well, this is something that should also inspire other countries to be more conscious about the environment. Although i'm pretty sure that for developing countries like the Philippines this is just yet a dream though this should serve as our inspiration.

More bridges from recycled plastic should be made. It is like hitting two birds with one stone. We can lessen our use of lumber which of course will benefit us a lot in our fight against deforestation and we will also lessen pollution from plastic which is said to be the number 1 pollutant in our bodies of water. These bridges are also resistant to molds, moisture and termites which means that it requires less maintenance.