Points of Progress: Building a recycled highway, and more

1. United States

Caltrans, the state transportation agency, partnered with engineering startup TechniSoil to pave the nation’s first highway with recycled plastic. The company uses reclaimed PET, a type of plastic commonly found in water bottles and other single-use containers, to bind ground-up, recycled asphalt. The binding agent in traditional asphalt paving is a black sticky substance called bitumen, produced by oil refining. TechniSoil’s process uses the equivalent of roughly 150,000 plastic bottles per mile and requires less energy than traditional repaving