Meet the New Pavement Recycling Machine
This monster Wirtgen grinder can chomp through 12 inches of old asphalt in a wink. The debris is then carried by a conveyor belt to waiting trucks. After that, it’s hauled to an asphalt recycling plant and reprocessed into new asphalt. The grinder is a self- propelled 280-hp model W 120 F, designed to completely remove asphalt to a depth of over one foot.
Down in Southern California American Asphalt is doing a different kind of recycling and resurfacing. There they take ground up automobile tires and put them in a slurry surfacing machine to pave some of the streets of San Diego. The ground up tire mixture makes the pavement more elastic and gives a blacker look, which makes for better delineation. Over the years American Asphalt has probably recycled over a million tires.