Our colleagues at our Asda Wakefield store are loving the environmentally-friendly makeover of the car park.
The asphalt used to resurface the car park is made from the equivalent of 90,000 non-reyclable plastic water bottles or 100,000 one-use plastic bags which would otherwise have gone to landfill sites or even been incinerated.
The plastic is ground into tiny pieces and mixed together with bitumen, a sticky, black, and highly viscous liquid which sets to form the asphalt that can be used on car parks or roads.
The Wakefield project was carried out using a product made by plastic roads company MacRebur.. Its CEO Toby McCartney said: "The plastics we use could not be recycled for anything else. What we do is take an engineered product and mix it with another engineered product – bitumen – to form our ashpalt. It's a little bit different to other asphalts. Ours is more durable so it can take more traffic and it's less likely to crack when it freezes or gets too hot.
"Customers who use the car park at Wakefield won't notice any difference, only the fact that it will last longer than other road surfaces!
"It's important that any business looks at environmental issues, so it really great that Asda is getting on board."
Asda construction manager Daniel Hargreaves said the resurfacing of the Wakefield car park was "a really innovative way" to use unrecycable plastic.
He said: "We’re hoping with the success of this roll out in our Wakefield store, we will be able to look at using this exciting and more environmentally-friendly approach to car parks across the Asda estate."
