In today’s culture, to be green is to be great. Under the umbrella of its GreenDOT program, the Massachusetts Department of Transportation (MassDOT) has given its six districts leeway to employ innovative techniques to use more sustainable practices for greener asphalt pavement maintenance and preservation.In the December 2012 GreenDOT Implementation Plan,road repair sealing machine kelly officials spelled out the department’s stewardship goal: “Operate the transportation system in a manner that embraces our stewardship of the Commonwealth’s natural, cultural and historic resources.”

Thus May 2016 found MassDOT District 3 Construction Engineer Michael Hartnett, P.E., planning for specific sustainable action alongside Gregg Berkley, senior project manager for P.J. Keating Co., of Lunenburg, Mass., and Peter Montenegro,road machine chip sealer sale wholesale construction marketing consultant for Collaborative Aggregates LLC (CollAgg), of Wilmington, Mass., at the laboratory of Walaa Mogawer, Ph.D., a civil engineering professor at the UMass Dartmouth Highway Sustainability Research Center (HSRC). Mogawer’s lab won a $249,000+ grant from the New England Transportation Consortium in 2014 with the purpose of studying new ways to use reclaimed asphalt shingles (RAS) from roofs. That kind of green thinking is what MassDOT is looking for.

At the UMass Dartmouth HSRC, Mogawer introduced Hartnett and Berkley to the concept of using the specific rejuvenator Delta S to address oxidized binder concerns in mixes with high reclaimed asphalt pavement (RAP) percentages. While Mogawer’s researchers have tested the proposed mix design extensively in the lab,cost to slurry seal asphalt Hartnett identified a pavement section in Worcester where the mix design could be put to real-world use in a mill-and-fill application.This gave MassDOT District 3 an opportunity to explore the GreenDOT’s sustainability mandate by increasing RAP use from 15% in a surface course to 40%. Take a look at what the team accomplished.