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In the Race

Now, here, you see, it takes all the blogging I can do to keep in the same place.
If I want to get somewhere else, I must blog twice as fast as that!
You see, I'm in the Red Queen's Race...

A Fork In The Road

By Janet Evans
Sunday, Jun 1 2008, 02:05 PM





Asphalt being used in paving a road





The price of oil not only has an impact on the price of gas. 

What about the price of plastics? 

And how about the cost of building roads? 

Roads are most often made with asphalt. 

A portion of asphalt is made with oil.







“Until now, asphalt has been cheap, which is another reason hot mixes have remained the standard. But as the price of petroleum has hit record levels, so too has the price of asphalt - and the cost of applying it. Asphalt sold for $35 a ton a few years ago, but it's up to $80 and could hit $100. That has some states scaling back repaving projects and looking for alternatives. Asphalt already is one of the most frequently widely recycled products in the country, but switching to cold-mix would allow the use of even more recycled products - which already include rubber, glass and concrete - when producing blacktop.”


[Hussain] Bahia [of the University of Wisconsin-Madison] is part of a $5 million research program called the Asphalt Research Consortium, which hopes to, among other things, make blacktop more ecologically sustainable. One of his first goals is to develop "cold-mix" asphalts that require significantly less energy than conventional asphalt to apply."


Read about his study at Wired   í  here




 
A road being paved with asphalt






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