Dykes Paving has over 30 years of experience in the development and use of recycled materials for their paving projects. Their materials meet industry standards, are strong, affordable, and meet LEED certification for associated credits. The use of recycled construction materials in your pavement projects allows the opportunity to protect the environment, reduce the use of new materials, save money, and also have a high-quality product.

LEED (Leadership in Energy & Environmental Design) Certification is another of the many benefits offered by using recycled materials. Note that the following information concerns LEED Certification credits and Dykes Paving’s expertise in the industry to learn more about the LEED program in general sense click here.

LEED Certification Points and Credits

Use of recycled materials in your Atlanta LEED Projects allows your business to gain points in the following two areas based on the materials used and the location of origin of these materials.

1. Materials and Resources Credit 4 Recycled Content: credits are earned by the use of recycled materials in your paving projects. To simplify the more recycled material used in the completion of the project the more points are gained. The scale is 10 percent is one point, 20 percent two points, and an extra point may be earned if 30 percent or more of the project’s costs use recycled materials. As industry experts, Dykes Paving materials are 100 percent made from recycled materials allowing you to gain the maximum amount of credits.

2. Materials and Resources Credit 5 Regional Materials: additional points can be earned based on where recycled materials are sourced from. Recycled materials are considered regional if they are processed and manufactured within 500 miles of the job’s location. Regional Material credits use the same percentage and point scale as the Recycled Content credits. Much like Dykes Paving’s commitment to recycled materials they are also committed to using local materials from the surrounding greater Atlanta area.

Projects That Should Make Use Of LEED Certified Paving

Another of LEED certified pavings advantage is that it can be used in many different paving projects. The use of recycled material does not limit the paving’s strength or durability and it can be used for structural fills, as a road base, to support existing infrastructure, drainage systems, storm water control, and in projects where soil needs to be stabilized. LEED certified paving should be considered for any project that has a need in the above-listed areas.

Lastly, when considering a paving expert you want to hire a company with the experience and knowledge needed to do the project right. With decades of experience, Dykes Paving can help complete any LEED paving projects.

According to the both National Asphalt Pavement Association and the Federal Highway Administration, recycled pavement is the most used recycled material in the country and it is easy to see why. Recycled materials offer a cost effective, environmentally sustainable alternative to using newer cold and hot mix materials. It is also an effective means of generating aspects for LEED certification as well as producing general goodwill and community awareness on the part of the property owner and the material contractor.

The use of Reclaimed Asphalt Pavement (RAP) can represent a significant reduction in transport costs as it can be used in place in both hot and cold mix applications. For those applications in which offsite transport is still necessary such as those requiring milling or crushing, RAP still represents a viable alternative to virgin materials as RAP has already undergone weathering and polishing which reduces the degradation when used in crushing and milling. Thereby reducing material costs as well as providing an acceptable friction resistance. In addition, when used in mixed applications with virgin materials, the overall resulting mix material quality is increased, further reducing costs and providing a benefit to the contractor as to product quality.

Recycled Pavement offers numerous benefits with very low risk to either property owners or contractors and thus should be used whenever possible. By working with a knowledgeable and experienced pavement provider concerning the use of RAP, your business can take the right steps to a cost effective and sustainable future for all.

An uneven parking lot also makes it more difficult for suppliers and customers to carry fragile materials in their cars, increasing the risk that valuable supplies will be broken.

Reliable Rehabilitation

Small cracks, chips, and holes in your pavement are a prelude to more serious structural damage. If you repair them early on, you’ll avoid having to replace the entire pavement, saving thousands of dollars and reducing hazards to drivers and pedestrians alike. Dykes Paving uses hot pour resurfacing to fill in pavement cracks and other damages as soon as they appear, extending the life of your pavement by as much as 20 years. We’ll give your pavement a beautiful, sleek appearance while minimizing all costs, whether financial, environmental, or health-related.

Professional Paving

The Dykes team is made up of 70 well-trained employees who are committed to providing quick,  professional paving services. We’ve been active in the Atlanta area since 1968 and have paved over 12 million square yards of asphalt. We’ve worked on a myriad of high-profile projects in the  city, including recycling the Atlanta Airport’s old concrete runways in 2002 as well as replacing  the old Atlantic Steel mill with Atlantic Station in 2003. However large or small the project, we  provide quick, affordable solutions and will stay on sight until the job is complete.

Sustainable Service

Though asphalt is already one of the most sustainable paving materials available, Dykes Paving has led the way in further reducing the environmental impact of paving projects. We have pioneered new methods for recycling asphalt and make all of our aggregate materials from 100% recycled content. This reduces the amount of energy and raw materials needed to carry out new paving projects while keeping asphalt waste out of the landfill. We rely almost entirely on local suppliers and materials, lowering greenhouse gas emissions from transportation while promoting businesses in our community. With Dykes, you’ll never have to choose between saving the earth, supporting your community, and purchasing quality, affordable paving.

Catering to Customers

Dykes Paving doesn’t impose solutions. We work with customers to find the paving projects that will work best for them. We answer all requests courteously, provide as many proposals as possible, and are happy to work with businesses, homeowners, property managers, and all other customers. So, don’t let poor paving get out of hand. Contact Dykes Paving today for professional, sustainable commercial paving services.

Importance of Recycling Concrete

Broken concrete, especially the amount that would come from a large business’ parking lot, needs to go somewhere after it has been removed. You will be charged a fairly high fee for the old concrete to be hauled away, especially since it will take several trips with very large trucks to remove all of it. By recycling your broken concrete, you will save yourself the money on the haul-away fee, and possibly add to the value of your property.

Uses for Broken Concrete

A few of the more common uses for broken concrete include:

• Making walkways
• Building retaining walls
• Decoration
• Controlling erosion

Walkways are a great use for old concrete, since they do not need to stand up to extremely heavy loads like a driveway or parking lot. Building a walkway around a commercial building, apartment complex, or home is relatively simple, and you do not have to pay for new concrete to be poured, or wait for it to set.

Constructing a retaining wall out of broken concrete is a great way to save money on the materials needed to build the wall, and it can give it a rustic look that is not easily achievable with fresh concrete. Depending on the size of the retaining wall, it may end up using all of your available concrete, and then some, meaning you do not have to worry about having the rest of it hauled away.

Broken concrete can be used to make inlaid decorations outside in a patio area, in your landscaping, or other space that could use a new look. The decorative piece can be in nearly any sort of pattern that you want, and all that limits the size is how much space you have available.

Erosion control has been a big use for broken concrete for many years, though technology does make it a little easier to build shore walls, it can be prohibitively expensive to have a company build an erosion control wall for just a small lake or pond. By using broken concrete, you can prevent a pond from becoming filled with sediment by just dropping the pieces around most of the shoreline. The effect of wave action is greatly diminished, keeping the depth and area of the pond intact.

How Dykes Paving is Committed to Recycling

Dykes Paving constantly tries to show its customers in and around Atlanta, Georgia that reducing waste is not only good for the environment, but good for your checkbook. We recycle asphalt, concrete, and even roofing shingles, in order to keep costs low, help you get LEED credits, and keep our landfill footprint as small as possible. Recycling helps both us, and the consumer, save both time, and money.

There is really no drawback to reusing your broken concrete when you have the opportunity. It allows you to save money by dropping the haul away expense of new construction, it shows your customers you care about recycling, and you can improve your property at a fraction of the price of building new.

The question that arose in the past few years, thanks to an associate professor of civil engineering at the University of Texas at Arlington, Dr. Sahadat Hossain, was: what if there was a way to spend $200,000 or $300,000 on repairs instead of a million dollars on repairs while taking millions – if not billions – of non-decomposing plastic bottles out of landfills at the same time?

Dr. Hossain’s idea is to use recycled plastic soda bottles to create pins to stabilize the roads and lessen the incidence of cracks and buckling, thereby making the roads last longer. Not only is this a cheaper fix, but it is one that will last years longer than more traditional solutions. Each pin is constructed from 500 recycled soda bottles, so the environment is positively affected as well, giving Texas a green fix to a decades-old problem.

According to a report in The Atlantic Cities, a two-year feasibility study was done on sections of Texas Route 287 where 10-foot long pins were drilled into one section of roadway slope. The rest of the highway was left as it was; unsupported. After the study ended this past August, it was found that the supported section had moved only one to two inches, where the control sections – the ones left unsupported – had moved about 15 inches.

The Texas DOT realized this was an idea that would be smart to cash in on, and gave Dr. Hossein a million dollar grant to begin work on two other Texas highways. Dr. Hossain was quoted in the article as saying that he thinks the program could easily spread to other states, and possibly internationally at some point. Although each soil type is different, with research into pin design and placement, it could be done.

Supporting Green Products

Although the “green” movement has only come about in the past several years, companies such as Dykes Paving have had the environment in mind for decades. They have been working on using recycled materials for paving and supporting roads since before it was a popular phenomenon.

Dykes Paving, located in Atlanta since 1968, have been a top contractor among engineers, developers and other general contractors. Their patented inventions using recycled materials can be seen as proof of their evolution. They can take broken asphalt and turn it into a 20-100% recycled hot mix or cold mix asphalt, or use old roofing shingles to make both hot and cold mix asphalt and a dust suppression mix that is a 100% recycled product. They also recycle demolition concrete and excavated shot rock.

Conclusion

You can support our environment and make sure the Earth is able to sustain life for centuries by doing your part to recycle, and using companies like Dykes who find ways to use recycled products to make the world around us a better place.

What is Recycled Asphalt?

In technical terms, the Western United States defines virgin asphalt as a “bituminous substance that is used to bind aggregate together to create asphalt concrete.” Generally, asphalt concrete consists mainly of aggregate in which asphalt only makes up 5 to 7% of the total composition.

Recycled asphalt on the other hand is quite simply asphalt concrete which has been reprocessed by mixing the reclaimed asphalt pavement with new asphalt and aggregates. In some circumstances, a recycling agent is also introduced into the mix to improve the performance of the recycled asphalt by softening and rejuvenating its mechanical properties.

The process of creating recycled asphalt usually begins with cold planing (also known as cold milling). In this procedure, the top layer of the pavement is removed using a cold planning machine. The pavement is usually made from Portland cement concrete which can then be crushed and used as the aggregate to form the recycled asphalt. After the recycled asphalt has been mixed, the composition can then be used to overlay the exposed pavement, thereby completing the recycling process.

Other types of asphalt recycling are known as hot recycling, hot in-place recycling, hot mix-remixing, hot mix-repaving, hot mix-heater scarification and full depth reclamation.

Why Recycle Asphalt?

Despite its elaborate process, recycling asphalt can help local governments save money from having to pave roads with new materials. At the same time, the act of recycling also introduces new business opportunities and will help create a greener environment in the long run as well. In 1990, the California Integrated Waste Management Board concluded that Construction and Demolition materials (including asphalt) made up 28% of the waste stream, totalling up to 11 million tons of waste in that year alone. A much deeper studied discovered that out of the 11 million tons of waste, 8.2 million tons were found to consist of asphalt, dirt, concrete, brick and other rubbles, out of which only 57% was recycled.

As asphalt also contains a high amount of oil, the price of virgin asphalt has also dramatically increased in line with the drastic oil price hike. With oil prices now hovering around the USD90 range, the demand for recycled asphalt is also growing in tandem as recycled asphalt is cheaper and yet just as durable as virgin asphalt.

Even if costing is not a problem, we are all obliged to protect the Earth’s natural resources for the sake of sustaining future generations. The repeated creation of asphalt is also known to contribute to environmental pollution, which is why recycling such toxic material is an effective method of reducing toxin production around the globe.

The creation of materials such as asphalt is also believed to contribute to climate change problems due to the burning of fossil fuels during the creation of asphalt. In contrast, producing recycled asphalt does not require any form of fossil fuel to be burnt, thereby preserving on our natural resources while also decreasing air pollution.

Roads paved with virgin asphalt have also been blamed for the urban heat island effect, which is a phenomenon where heat from the sun is absorbed into the ground, thereby heating the paved area even after the sun has set. On the other hand, recycled asphalt is lighter coloured, thereby making it less susceptible to heat absorption from solar radiation and hence, contributes less to the urban heat island effect.

At the same time, the introduction of recycled asphalt into the market can not only meet the USD100 billion asphalt demand but can also help create job opportunities as more recycling asphalt plants are created. As Asian countries in particular began to increase the amount of roadwork constructions, the recycled asphalt industry becomes a blue ocean choice in a red sea filled with expensive virgin asphalt suppliers whose prices are closely dependent on the price of oil at that point of time.

How to Fill Gaps with Recycled Asphalt

Homeowners can also contribute to a greener environment by applying recycled asphalt along their driveways as well. The first thing you need to do is thoroughly clean the surface of your pavement. It is best to do this with a high powered air blower first followed by a high power washer. You might also want to do this on a sunny day as it is important to allow the surface of your pavement time to completely dry before proceeding to the next step.

While waiting for the surface to dry, carefully mix hot or cold crack fillers. You can then fill up the holes in your driveway with the crack fillers, followed by a generous shovelling of recycled asphalt. To achieve a smooth finish, do run an asphalt rake over the surface area. To further condense the gap and prevent further cracks, you might also want to run a vibrating plate (or hand tamper) over the filled surface as well.

Next, carefully corner off the area to allow the filled gaps to completely dry for at least 24 hours before proceeding to apply commercial-grade asphalt seal coat to the surface. The purpose of the seal coat is to protect and extend the lifespan of the newly applied recycled asphalt, so do not skip this step.

How to Create Pavements with Recycled Asphalt

If you’re creating a new pavement, you might want to consider surfacing your pathway with recycled asphalt as well. A depth of at least 3 inches should first be created virgin aggregate is added, followed by recycled asphalt. Although recycled asphalt tends to leave tracks due to the higher content of oil, line paint and rubber, an extra layering of asphalt sealant can easily protect the rest of your flooring from asphalt contamination. Generally, we recommend that the sealant should at least be 1 inch thick to protect the integrity of the newly installed asphalt pavement.

As we just stated, recycled asphalt is obviously good for the environment. Asphalt is made from oil, which is a non-renewable resource and it can also be quite dangerous to extract.  Recycling used asphalt reduces the amount of new oil byproduct needed, and it also might reduce dependence on foreign oil. Recycling asphalt also cuts down on transportation costs needed to bring in new materials.

Recycled asphalt can be mixed into “hot mix” and “cold mix” paving applications, which is certainly a great benefit for paving contractors. The reuse of asphalt for fill, base or embankment asphalt paving projects can definitely save paving contractors money and materials, allowing for better roads, parking lots, etc.

Since asphalt is derived from petroleum, its cost is relative to the constantly changing prices of the market. Old asphalt is readily available to be pulled up or processed on site. Up to 25 percent of asphalt material in some states is made up of recycled asphalt. And, the Federal Highway Administration has research projects testing mixes of up to 50 percent. All in all, recycled asphalt saves money. Did you know that about 90 million tons of asphalt are recycled annually? This saves taxpayers hundreds of million of dollars each year. When asphalt is recycled, everyone wins: paving contractors, tax payers, and the planet as a whole.

Now that you’re aware of all of the amazing benefits of recycled asphalt, here’s some basic instructions for laying it (in case you ever get your hands on some, and want to do it yourself). Still, for the best results, it’s highly recommended that you contact your local paving contractors.

Step 1: Clear Area of Debris

Clear the soon-to-be-paved area of any pebbles, branches, or leaves that might be in the way.

Step 2: Make a Smooth Surface

Break up any large clumps of earth with your shovel, and subsequently, smooth out the surface with the rake, until your left with a smooth surface – ready to be paved.

Step 3: Lay the Recycled Asphalt

Lay the recycled asphalt across the area you wish to pave, so that you’re left with an even layer of around an inch.

Step 4: Tamp down the Recycled Asphalt

Do this with a hand tamper – hitting every square inch with a great deal of force to compact the layer of asphalt the best you can.

Step 5: Steam Roll

After your tamping is complete, use a steam roller to roll over, and further compress the recycled asphalt. This will help it in melting together so it can harden into a durable recycled asphalt surface.

Step 6: Curing

Allow at least 24 hours for your asphalt surface to cure.

If you’re interested in having your facility paved with eco-friendly recycled asphalt, don’t hesitate to contact Dykes Paving. We’re a premier paving company in Atlanta!

“Reclaiming/Recycling: The Kings Gesture

Road construction is a more than $80 billion annual industry in the U.S. Over the last decade, the industry has been driving toward greener and more sustainable design, construction, use and maintenance.

New technologies, new materials and new practices all play an important role in reducing the environmental impacts and maximizing economic and social benefits of our nation’s roadways.

The use of recycled materials in hot-mix asphalt (HMA) in road construction has long been an important green strategy of the asphalt-paving industry. Reclaimed asphalt pavement (RAP) is one of the most widely recycled materials in the U.S., with much of this material going into the construction of new roadways.

Recently, the use of recycled asphalt shingles (RAS) in paving has gained significant momentum. RAS can be derived from tear-off shingles from re-roofing projects or from manufacturers’ scrap. Currently 21 states and two Canadian provinces have specifications or procedures in place for using RAS in HMA (all allow manufacturers’ scrap and 11 states allow tear-off roofing shingles).

Using RAS in HMA has the potential to reduce the costs of paving due to the high quantity of oil in the shingles. By capturing the oil from the shingles, less virgin oil is needed in the HMA. However, for widespread use of RAS in HMA, engineers demand data to confirm that the use of RAS in HMA has no negative impact on roadway performance. A rigorous paving demonstration in King County, Wash., is showing the potential for widespread use of this recycled material.

Certainty is high

In fall 2009, a 2-mile-long stretch of roadway in south King County was overlaid with a 2-in.-thick layer of HMA, incorporating both RAP and RAS derived from tear-off roofing shingles in designated test sections. Road engineers have been closely monitoring the roadway’s performance and are seeing good results. The project is a collaboration of King County Solid Waste Division’s LinkUp program, the King County Road Services Division (KCRSD), the Washington State Department of Transportation (WSDOT) and Seattle Public Utilities. An advisory group of representatives from across the industry was brought together to provide input and help guide the project.

The goal of King County’s paving demonstration is to show—with a high degree of certainty—that the addition of RAS to HMA has no significant negative impact on pavement performance. The paving demonstration was the first in the state to use RAS in HMA to pave a public roadway in a controlled experiment.

“We are pleased to report that, one year later, the pavement is performing as good as a traditional roadway,” said Paulette Norman, KCRSD acting director. “This is an innovative approach that can help cut paving costs for taxpayers while keeping a valuable resource out of landfills. We are thrilled to see it performing well.”

The positive results from a road-paving demonstration bodes well for the future recycling of some 40,000 tons of tear-off roofing shingles generated in King County annually.

“This is exciting because it creates a new use for a material that has traditionally gone to landfills,” said Kevin Kiernan, division director of the King County Solid Waste Division. “Recycling asphalt shingles not only benefits the environment, but can have a positive economic impact as well.”

The most recent development is that WSDOT—which was closely involved in King County’s paving demonstration—is now working with the paving industry to outline requirements and next steps for a permissive specification to allow increased RAP and RAS in the design, production and acceptance of HMA in Washington state, with a goal to allow RAS in the 2011 paving season.

“This project is important to the paving industry in our state,” said Tom Gaetz with the Washington Asphalt Paving Association. “Our members are excited and ready to provide HMA with shingles to private- and public-sector customers.”

A touch of shingle

To implement the paving demonstration, LinkUp and its project partners worked with a team of stakeholders to address the interests of key market players, ground the study in reality and provide technical and other resource contributions. An advisory group was assembled to provide technical input and to ensure that the demonstration captured objective engineering data needed to gain wide acceptance of results. KCRSD played a leadership role by dedicating a roadway in King County for the demonstration, conducting pre- and post-construction testing and managing the paving contract. WSDOT provided valuable expertise and laboratory services related to the development of specifications and led the HMA mix design and testing. Advisory group members included regulatory agencies, HMA producers, recyclers, roofing contractors and local transportation agencies.

Selecting the right roadway helped lay a foundation for a successful demonstration. KCRSD selected a 2-mile stretch of roadway to be paved with 4,000 tons of 2-in.-thick overlay, offering the right mix of HMA tonnage requirements and traffic volumes, as well as manageable surface and subsurface conditions. Based on extensive evaluation of pre-construction roadway conditions, KCRSD designed the study with four HMA test sections: two experimental sections containing 3% RAS and 15% RAP, and two control sections containing only 15% RAP, as illustrated in Table 1.

Designing the technical standards involved developing specifications for the RAS product and the RAS-modified HMA mix.

The RAS specification included requirements for allowable materials, gradation, extraneous materials, moisture and asbestos-containing materials (ACM), as well as health, safety and other environmental requirements associated with handling asphalt shingles. The shingles recycler was required to inspect incoming loads of shingles, sort and remove all nonshingle materials and sample and test the shingles stockpile to verify that the material was free from ACM. While the risk of finding asbestos in asphalt shingles is low to none, other roofing products such as built-up roofing and mastics are known to contain asbestos, so they were not allowed.

The HMA mix design specified the amounts of RAS and RAP, as well as the estimated amount of virgin binder replacement from the RAS. The inclusion of RAP was not initially part of the study but because King County roads are traditionally paved with an average of 15% RAP, stakeholders strongly recommended that the experimental mix design include RAP to best reflect typical asphalt mixes in production today.

Through a competitive bidding process, KCRSD awarded the paving demonstration contract to Woodworth & Co. in July 2009. Woodworth is an HMA producer and paving contractor.

More stock in the pile

Woodworth proposed using an existing RAS stockpile (ground product) for the demonstration. While the RAS specification called for specific quality assurance and quality control procedures for incoming whole shingles, King County agreed to consider the proposed stockpile provided that the material met asbestos and material engineering standards. Initial testing of 20 samples of the ground stockpile using the standard polarized light microscopy test for ACM came back nondetect for all 20 samples.

King County also tested five additional samples using transmission electron microscopy, a more sensitive test for asbestos, which detected ACM in low levels. King County worked closely with its asbestos-accredited laboratory and a consultant with extensive experience as a roofer and accredited asbestos inspector to understand the test findings. Given the low level of ACM by weight in the samples, the expert consensus was that the ACM most likely came from non­shingle material.

The team decided that more aggressive inspection and sorting of incoming material was needed to identify and remove any potential ACM. Using a revised protocol and on-site training, the crew at Woodworth’s facility hand-sorted and rejected any potential ACM roofing materials from new incoming roofing material. Of the few nonshingle items sorted out of the whole shingle stockpile, two types of ACM roofing materials were identified through testing: builtup roofing with an aluminum coating and a patching material found on a few of the shingles. Within several days, a new RAS stockpile was produced, tested and accepted for processing.

Looking at fines

Materials engineering testing of the RAS product after processing indicated that the RAS product met the extraneous materials limit of the RAS specification, but did not meet the gradation and moisture content requirements by relatively small margins. Table 2 summarizes key engineering properties of the finished RAS product. Even though the materials exceeded the gradation and moisture limits, the KCRSD determined that the RAS product substantially met the engineering intent for the paving demonstration. This decision was in part based on the facts that Woodworth’s process included further reducing the material in size when blended with RAP and that excessive moisture content was manageable given consistent readings.

Additional testing was conducted on the HMA mix during production and pavement construction. Testing verified that all but one of the four test sections substantially met project specifications and materials standards. The test section in question was the first RAS-modified HMA mix, where higher oil and fines content led to significantly low air voids in the job mix. In-place density tests further verified air void loss. These results were below the WSDOT acceptance tolerance for air voids for field-produced HMA. However, the pavement looked perfect at lay down and initially performed as expected.

Additionally, WSDOT’s HMA mix design was slightly over-engineered in that it was for a roadway with more traffic than what is typical for the demonstration roadway. Thus, the engineering team decided to leave the questionable test section pavement in place but to modify the HMA to reduce the virgin asphalt content and fines for the second RAS-modified test section, which proved successful.

The high oil content in the first RAS-modified HMA mix indicated that the RAS product introduced into the HMA mix contributed a greater amount of asphalt binder to the final HMA product than originally expected. Both Woodworth and WSDOT staff hypothesize that double grinding RAS to meet gradation requirements resulted in smaller particle sizes and may have enabled more of the RAS binder to be released and effectively utilized in the HMA than originally predicted. Future research and analysis is recommended to confirm this hypothesis.

Meeting King’s demands

After paving installation, a series of tests were conducted to evaluate pavement performance. Extensive initial materials-engineering tests on the demonstration pavement indicate that using RAS as a part of the HMA mix has had no negative effect on pavement performance. Initial post-construction testing for deterioration, skid resistance, roughness, structural condition and rutting all indicated that all test sections of the roadway were meeting performance standards. To assess the condition of the roadway, the King County Materials Laboratory performed pavement-condition surveys by walking the site and documenting distressed areas.

Additional pavement condition surveys were conducted by WSDOT using a distress data collection van. The surveys revealed the roadway surface in all test sections continued to appear in excellent condition. The minor amounts of wear and tear shown are consistent with the expected performance of a road paved with traditional HMA. These tests were repeated one year after construction, yielding positive results, and are currently planned to continue annually through 2012.

Just as significant as these empirical engineering test results, the paving demonstration illustrated the critical importance of a multiparty partnership approach to such research and development efforts. Successful implementation of the paving demonstration was a direct result of the productive input and engagement of KCRSD, WSDOT, Woodworth and stakeholders. LinkUp is continuing to coordinate with other regional and national efforts to further the use of RAS in HMA and is planning to incorporate pavement with RAS in its own projects, including the rebuilding of several solid-waste transfer stations. LinkUp also will support WSDOT and the paving industry through the development of a permissive specification in Washington state for using RAS in HMA. Part of this effort will involve closer coordination with regulators, roofing contractors and shingle recyclers on best practices for sourcing and testing of tear-off roofing asphalt shingles for processing.”

If you’re interested in learning more about sustainable asphalt paving solutions, or you’d simply like a paving job completed, don’t hesitate to contact Dykes Paving, your premier paving contractors in Atlanta!

In 1978, he bought a drum mix asphalt plant and modified it to re-heat old asphalt. Dykes Paving then became the first Georgia company to recycle hot mix asphalt successfully.

The following year, Dykes purchased its first rock crusher, then adapted it to process broken asphalt. This provided the company with another important tool in the recycling process.

In 1980, Dykes introduced the Perma Flex® hot mix asphalt system, which fills, seals and preps cracked pavement to allow for an application of fresh asphalt directly on top of it. Perma Flex® not only puts an end to reflective cracking and saves a lot of money, it also is kinder to the environment because it eliminates the need to rip up old pavement, haul it away in heavy diesel-burning trucks and dump it into landfills.

The next year, Dykes became an ambassador for recycled asphalt in Georgia, donating the material for two test projects. The tests resulted in the Georgia Department of Transportation approving recycled asphalt for all Georgia roadways – a huge step forward in making our state greener.

In the years that followed, Dykes continued to improve its processes to use more and more recycled asphalt in its hot mix designs. It also bought larger rock crushers, including a mobile unit, to keep Atlanta’s old asphalt, demolition concrete and other waste out of landfills, and help transform them into useful materials for new projects.

In 2001, Dykes invented RTR^TM Econo Pave, a “roof to road” paving product made from recycled asphalt, waste oil from restaurants and old roofing shingles. It was, and remains today, the only cold mix asphalt consisting of 100 percent recycled content. In addition to being a completely recycled product, RTR^TM eliminates the need for asphalt plants in the counties that use it, which means fewer land disturbances, less air pollution and lower energy consumption.

Aside from being a leader in recycled hot mix asphalt and the inventor of Perma Flex® and RTR^TM Econo Pave, Dykes is now the fourth largest producer of recycled aggregates in the nation. All Dykes’ aggregate materials, while meeting strict industry standards, are made from 100 percent recycled material.

Jim Dykes’ dedication to producing top quality paving products while helping to protect our earth and its natural resources has made him a true innovator in his field, and has been hugely beneficial to the environment. As of December 2008, Dykes Paving had recycled more than 28 million tons of asphalt and concrete. Most of this was processed onsite or within 5 miles of its source.

Dykes’ visionary work has resulted in the reduction of more than:

• 18 million tons (1 million dump truck loads) of waste from metro Atlanta landfills
• 18 million tons of aggregate mined from rock quarries
• 64 million gallons of liquid asphalt manufactured from U.S. refineries
• 10 million miles driven by dump trucks on Atlanta roadways
• 2 million gallons of diesel fuel burned

What do these reductions mean for Georgians and the environment in which they live?

• Cleaner air, because of reduced greenhouse gas emissions from work trucks and mining machinery
• Cleaner air, thanks to the reduction of toxic volatile organic compound emissions produced by the manufacturing of traditional paving products and aggregates
• A more plentiful water supply, due to the reduction of water consumption required in the mining process
• Conservation of more of Georgia’s natural habitat
• Less dependence on foreign oil, thanks to reduced consumption from work trucks and machinery
• Less wear and tear on Georgia roads, thanks to reduced need for dump truck usage

Since its very beginning, Dykes Paving has been producing top-quality paving solutions with environmental responsibility in mind. Today, the company is a proud member of the U.S. Green Building Council, which developed the LEED (Leadership in Energy & Environmental Design) certification process. If you have a paving need in the metro Atlanta area, and want your job done in the most environmentally conscientious way possible, contact Dykes. Call 770-448-3392 or click here to send an email now.