Two pavement experiments begin in the Bronx
New York City is testing two recycled asphalt mixtures on Fordham Road in the Bronx, using an active street project to study whether alternative materials can withstand heavy bus traffic and the city’s weather. One mixture contains steelmaking byproduct and is made with 96 percent recycled material. The other modifies the asphalt binder with waste plastic, including material derived from drink bottles.
The Department of Transportation placed the experimental pavement on the eastern section of Fordham Road between Webster Avenue and Southern Boulevard. That segment is part of a broader redesign adding offset bus lanes and safety improvements along the Bronx’s busiest bus corridor, which the city says serves about 130,000 riders each day.
The materials follow different approaches
The steel-slag mix uses 66 percent recycled steel slag aggregate, a byproduct of steel production, as part of its 96 percent recycled content. City engineers will monitor whether the material improves durability in a corridor exposed to frequent stopping, turning and the concentrated weight of buses. Longer-lasting pavement could reduce the frequency of repairs, but field performance in New York conditions will determine whether the mix is suitable for wider use.
The plastic-modified mix takes another route, using processed waste plastic as an alternative to virgin polymers in the binder that holds the pavement together. For this project, DOT says the mixture incorporates the equivalent of more than 1.9 million plastic bottles. The agency estimates it will avoid about 56.6 metric tons of carbon-dioxide-equivalent emissions, comparable to the emissions from roughly 144,135 miles driven by an average gasoline passenger vehicle.
Those estimates describe material and production effects attributed to the current paving job. They do not yet demonstrate how long either surface will last. A pavement that uses more recycled content but requires unusually frequent replacement could lose some of its environmental advantage, which is why durability monitoring is central to the trial.
New York already reuses old pavement
The city’s two municipal asphalt plants currently produce mixes containing an average of 40 percent recycled material. Reusing milled pavement reduces demand for newly quarried material and can lower disposal and transportation costs. DOT has tested mixtures containing as much as 50 percent recycled road material on a limited scale since 2019 and developed an in-house 50 percent recycled-asphalt-pavement mix this year for future street work.
The new Fordham Road tests go further by combining very high recycled content with materials from outside the usual pavement stream. That could create another destination for steel slag and certain plastics, but scaling the approach would require dependable supply, quality controls and evidence that the finished road performs at least as well as conventional pavement.
A practical test under demanding conditions
Fordham Road is a demanding laboratory. Buses, deliveries and high traffic volumes put repeated stress on the surface, while freeze-thaw cycles and utility work can accelerate cracking and potholes. If the mixtures perform well there, engineers will have a stronger basis for considering them on other high-use streets.
The city has not announced a date for final results or a commitment to broad adoption. Residents and transportation advocates should therefore view the work as a measured trial, not a completed change in paving policy. The useful next step will be public reporting on cracking, rutting, maintenance costs and emissions over time, allowing environmental gains to be weighed against real-world durability.
Source: New York City Department of Transportation announcement. Reporting reviewed October 24, 2026.