From junkyard to $630m road
When the Kapiti expressway finally opens, motorists will be driving on a road filled with recycled polystyrene, thanks to one Kiwi bloke with a can-do attitude.
Part-entrepeneur, part-mad inventor Richard Moore has spent more than a decade creating a machine from junkyard parts that turns polystyrene packaging into dense, lightweight fill for roading infrastructure.
Moore said his company, Poly Palace, had already diverted enough polystyrene into the $630 million expressway between McKays and Peka Peka, north of Wel- lington, to fill an Olympic swimming pool.
His machine is made from components including an old dentistry vacuum pump, a molding apparatus from an old sewage plant, and a cutting appliance originally designed for use with washing machine motors.
It resembles a giant cappuccino machine fed by a hay baler.
Crushed polystyrene is fed in, then melted. it comes out of the dripper and is able to be bound into dense blocks, which Moore calls Eco-Slab.
Expressway project manager John Palm said the polystyrene fill had been used in eight bridges along the 18-kilometre expressway, due to open in early 2017.
The blocks had been placed in areas where concrete formwork was too complex to construct and remove, he said.
‘‘This includes, in between concrete barriers or on foundations below a concrete slab.’’ The project team ordered 180 cubic metres of material, equal to the volume of more than six months’ worth of polystyrene recycling deposited at the Spicer Landfill in Porirua.
Moore said his recycling system was the culmination of his life’s work in the waste industry, and he hoped that one day a replica of his machine would be found at every landfill in the country.
‘‘My gig is I can make anything from junk, except money,’’ he said.
‘‘The thing with this technology is you can’t just buy it from a factory in China. It’s a Kiwi innovation – the No 8 wire, the cable ties.’’
Moore works alone from his factory in Porirua and said he could recycle all of Wellington’s polystyrene waste. ‘‘At the end of the day I believe in a better world, the sustainable future is here – it’s just not well implemented.’’