Nebraska Department Receives Grant for Recycled Tires

The Nebraska Department of Roads has been awarded a grant of $420,657 from the Nebraska Department of Environmental Quality’s Waste Reduction and Recycling Incentive Grants Program.

The grant program provides funds annually for integrated waste management activities in Nebraska. These funds will be used on a 7.3 mile overlay project on I-80 from Gibbon to Shelton using recycled automobile tires in the asphalt pavement.

The highway improvement project will use about 47,000 used Nebraska tires. Providing the scrap tires to the construction company will be Entire, a tire recycling operation that has a tire supply in Nebraska City, Neb.

Nebraska and the contracting industry will gain experience working with this new type of material and will attempt to advance pavement technology with the use of recycled tire rubber.

Laird Weishahn, with the state of Nebraska’s Department of Roads, said that the state used crumb rubber from old tires around 12 years ago. After the mandate, the state didn’t use any more crumb rubber until last year, when some crumb rubber from old tires was used in a portion of a road.

The contractor on this project is Dobson Bros. Construction Company of Lincoln, Nebraska.

While the upfront cost to using crumb rubber is higher than other materials, Weishahn feels that over the long term, the use of the crumb rubber, which has met the quality criteria, will prove beneficial over the long term.

It is estimated that the crumb rubber will make up as much as 20 percent of the raw material to make the overlay.

The project is expected to begin by the end of next month.