Radio & television

Richard Gosselink at Doe Maar Duurzaam! about sustainable asphalt

Dutch asphalt roads are currently still bound with bitumen, made from fossil resources. Richard Gosselink of Wageningen Food & Biobased Research explains at ‘Doe Maar Duurzaam!’ how a new binder made from bio-based resources will make asphalt more sustainable.

'By replacing bitumen with lignin and other bio-based materials, a much more environmentally friendly alternative is created,' says researcher Gosselink. Lignin is made from side streams from the paper industry, for example. Ingrid Haaksman shows how new mixing techniques and compositions of the binder are being researched in the lab.

At the moment there are twenty-five test roads in the Netherlands,' says Gosselink. In those test roads, 50% of the lignin binder has been processed. The goal is to deliver a test strip with a 100% sustainable asphalt binder that is suitable for further upscaling within three years.