October 2025
From waste to wayfinding: How recycled polymers are setting a new course for UK roads
The UK’s road infrastructure is currently balancing on a knife edge. Significant underinvestment in our roads for many years has caused the ‘pothole pandemic’, only made worse by the challenges of the rising cost of materials and inflation. Now, local authorities find themselves faced with £16.3 billion1 in road repair backlogs with dwindling budgets. And, as extremities in climate change become more frequent, local authorities must consider carbon reduction alternatives to traditional methods. Of course, all of this comes at a cost. For an island that built some of the world’s safest roads, technical innovation, particularly in the eyes of the average UK road user, has been frustratingly slow.
:quality(80))
A shift in mindset
According to data from the Road Emulsion Association (REA), UK roads are only resurfaced once every 80 years on average2 and approximately 52% of our road network has less than 15 years of structural life remaining3. Perhaps even more striking is the latest data from the ALARM 2025 Survey from the Asphalt Industry Alliance (AIA)4, where it’s reported that one in every six miles of the local road network has less than five years of structural life left. Local authorities now must switch from short-term remediation techniques to long-term, cost-effective solutions to rectify the vicious cycle we now find ourselves in.
For many years, key industry stakeholders have been lobbying local councillors to shift their reactive mindset of road resurfacing to a preventative one. Utilising solutions like surface dressing, insitu patching, warm mixed asphalt and recycled asphalt product (RAP) have major advantages in carbon reduction, reducing water ingress and delivering high performance under heavy traffic conditions. While these solutions have been more expensive than traditional methods, they also are much more cost-effective and can start to address structural integrity as part of preventative measures. With net-zero targets looming, time is now of the essence for local authorities.
Less waste, more haste
Fortunately, the road industry has been actively trialling innovative new technologies in asphalt production that are driven by sustainability goals. As part of a three-year £30 million UK-wide programme, funded by the Department for Transport, ADEPT Live Labs 2 is an example of this push for innovation to decarbonise local highways infrastructure. Led by local authorities, commercial and academic partners, the programme is grouped into four themes across seven projects across the UK, including North Lanarkshire’s Motherwell scheme, the Devon A382 development and the Greenprint project for West Sussex and South Gloucestershire.
Most recently, the North Lanarkshire project has seen Motherwell in Scotland become the first site in the UK to use a high-performance asphalt additive, which is made from recycled plastics, on its road surfaces. For the project, the material was manufactured into 35/14 HRA with recycled polymers and is part of a multi-stage refinement process developed by polymer modification specialists, ecopals, and the Fraunhofer Institute for Chemical Technology in Germany.
By avoiding combustion and reducing reliance on fossil-based materials, incorporating recycled polymers into the mix has meant that CO2 emissions can be decreased by up to 20% when compared to conventional asphalt. For the Motherwell project alone, which used up to half a ton on the road surface, this equates to an annual plastic consumption of more than six average households5.
Deployment of this material will now be trialled at different sites across the UK. With the help of distributors like ACI Group accelerating the drive to supply additives like this to our road infrastructure suppliers, collaborative efforts can mirror the proven performance success seen across Germany, where 15,000 tonnes of asphalt was modified for the Autobahn A7 using the same innovation.
A new twist on tried and tested formats
While conventional hot rolled asphalt has been favoured for years for its excellent road surfacing properties, warm mix asphalt is now on the rise. Produced at lower temperatures of 110+ degrees Celsius, warm mix delivers the same efficiencies of hot mix without compromising performance by using less heat and energy. Not only does this method reduce the amount of CO2 released during the production process, but it also enables roads to be opened more quickly due to its cooler temperatures when laid.
Lower temperatures are not the only reason for an increase in the uptake of warm mix asphalt though. Bio binders are also excellent complementary solutions for warm mix. These replace fossil-fuel based bitumen and can be made into PMB equivalents without the need for source binders or high shear mixing. Innovation in this area has partly been driven by Shell with its Bitumen CarbonSink material, which can both remove and store locked carbon. According to source data from Shell, the product can remove roughly 6 tonnes of CO2 for every kilometre of road surfaced (based on a model single surface layer – 500mm deep, 3.5mm wide and 5% binder content)6.
Renewed focus on extending road life
Alongside carbon reduction efforts, preventative maintenance for UK roads is a must. In the last year, reports verified by REA have noted that investment in surface dressing has increased for the first time since 2012. The bitumen emulsion spray is applied to an existing road surface and provides improved skid resistance texture, along with protection from water ingress. This system can extend the lifetime of a road by up to 15 years – as has been proven with the A5 in Shropshire, which remains pothole-free under heavy traffic 14 years after a PME surface dressing was applied7. Furthermore, cost-effective solutions containing natural bitumen such as Gilsonite can also be applied as a viable alternative to surface dressing.
As we face more climate uncertainty in the coming years and to support the move to heavier electric vehicles, there is a real need for more durable, resilient emulsion formulations on our roads. While innovation comes at a cost, ongoing trials are already shaping the road ahead. Collaborative initiatives like Live Labs - uniting local authorities, technical experts, suppliers, and distributors around a shared goal - are helping to re-establish the UK as one of the safest road networks in the world.
References
1,2, 7. REA, Polymer Modified Emulsions and Surface Dressing: The Key to Preventing the Next Pothole Pandemic, October 2025
3, 4. Asphalt Industry Alliance, ALARM Survey 2025, March 2025
5. The Herald, Motherwell’s bold plastic road experiment is paying off, October 2025
6. Anglo Liners, Everything but the CarbonSink: Shell launches new zero-carbon Bitumen, 2022