Globally, more than 400 million tons of plastic are produced each year, and less than 10% is recycled. Much of the rest ends up burned, buried or drifting through waterways, a problem that’s only getting worse.

As a civil engineer, I started asking a simple question: Instead of throwing used plastic away, what if we could build something useful with it?

That question led to a technology that mixes small amounts of recycled plastic with asphalt – the black, sticky material used to make roads and parking lots. The result is a stronger road that lasts longer and keeps some used plastic out of the environment.

You can see these roads on my university’s campus at the University of Texas at Arlington, where my team has paved test sections in parking lots. Perhaps more importantly for testing this technology at scale, we have constructed a one-mile section of plastic-infused road in Rockwall, Texas, a city near Dallas. We’ve gotten interest from more cities in and outside Texas as well.

My goal is to take one problem – plastic pollution – and use it to fix another: deteriorating roads.

I grew up in a low-income neighborhood in Bangladesh, near a large dump site. As a child, I noticed that people living closest to the piles of waste were often sick, while those farther away were healthier.

At the time, I didn’t know the science behind it – I just saw neighbors having to choose between buying medicine and buying dinner. That memory left........

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