GLASSPHALT MAKES N.Y. STREETS SHINE
Philadelphia Inquirer
Jun 17, 1991
By Andrew Maykuth, Inquirer Staff Writer

NEW YORK -- Streets here might not be paved with gold, as immigrants once
believed, but they sure look as if they're studded with diamonds.
For the last two years, New York City has recycled glass bottles into filler for
asphalt, producing a blacktop that sparkles and glitters.
So when the city repaved the street in front of the Plaza Hotel with the
glittery stuff, called "glassphalt," Donald Trump demanded that the other
streets around the hotel get similar treatment.
The pavement has become popular with a public that initially feared that
the visible green and brown glass particles would puncture car tires and
would blind motorists with harsh reflections, said Harold Watson, the city
Department of Transportation's assistant commissioner for asphalt
operations.
"Now, when we do a road, if we don't have glass on it, people come in and
start complaining," said Watson, who supervises the asphalt manufacturing
at a grimy city-owned plant on the Brooklyn waterfront. "They say, 'We pay
as much taxes as the next guy. Why did he get glass and not us? ' "
NEARLY 900 MILES
Since the city's operation began in earnest in 1989, the Transportation
Department has repaved nearly 900 lane-miles of streets in Manhattan and
Brooklyn with asphalt containing about 10 percent glass. Portions of
Broadway, Fifth Avenue, Sixth Avenue and Wall Street now glitter as much
as the city's famous marquees.
But New York's glassphalt program - the largest such glass-recycling
operation in the nation - might well fall victim to the city budget crisis.
Mayor David N. Dinkins has proposed suspending the city's recycling
operation next month to save the city $65 million a year in collection costs.
The mayor's proposal would halt the curbside collection program, which is
the source of much of the glass used in glassphalt.

 "That would be a shame," said Lucius Riccio, the city's transportation
commissioner. "We're doing a record amount of paving and we could use all
the glass they could give us."
MONEY SAVED
Riccio said the city saved $500,000 last year by using crushed glass to
replace part of the sand and gravel aggregate that makes up 95 percent of
asphalt pavement. (The remaining 5 percent is asphalt cement, the tarry,
petroleum byproduct that binds the aggregate together.)
That's not to mention the cost the city avoided by not having to dispose of
38,000 tons of glass in a landfill. The city uses only mixed-color glass in its
asphalt, the kind of waste glass that bottle recyclers - who want only clean,
color-separated glass - will not buy.
"You're saving the cost of the landfills," said Riccio. "You're saving us
money. You make what turns out to be a stronger asphalt. It makes the
streets look wonderful.
"And it's the best feedback you could be giving to the public that the efforts
they make to recycle are paying off. "
The operation also is overcoming conventional wisdom within an asphalt
industry that has long disregarded glass recycling as kind of a flaky
environmental invention.
Glassphalt seems to have been under perpetual study since it was
envisioned more than 20 years ago as a way of recycling waste glass. But
outside of Baltimore, which uses glassphalt to pave streets that it wants to
sparkle, most cities stopped using it after paving a few test streets.
"I've been trying to push it," said Alfred Dezzi, Philadelphia's recycling
coordinator. But, he said, his attempts to use glassphalt have been thwarted
by city and state highway officials who say they have no
specifications for glass in pavement.
"The first big barrier we come up with are these regulations," he said.
Watson says that such resistance is typical. He believes that stone and
sand suppliers, which stand to lose business if glassphalt becomes
accepted, are especially disdainful of the recycled pavement.
"There's a lot of people who can't find anything wrong with glassphalt but
won't say anything good about it," said Watson, who has become sort of an

 ambassador for glassphalt , traveling nationwide to deliver talks to such
groups as the Society of Asphalt Technicians.
NO SHARP EDGES
Motorists' greatest fears about driving on broken glass never materialized.
Researchers discovered that properly crushed glass lost its sharp edges and
did not puncture tires. And glare was a threat only when
asphalt makers failed to crush the glass small enough - the big shards
sparkled like spotlights.
Even if the city halts its glass collection system, that would not end the
Transportation Department's program for recycling street materials, Watson
said.
About 25 percent of the content of the city's asphalt is old pavement that
was milled from the surface of roadways before they were repaved. In
recent years the practice of recycling old pavement - it is ground up and
melted with new asphalt to form a pavement nearly as good as virgin
material - has become a fairly common paving technique.
What can Watson come up with next to dazzle the public?
"We thought about separating the green glass and putting that pavement
in the Irish neighborhoods," he said.
His eyes sparkled like the pavement he makes. "I'm just kidding."