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Recycling technology paves the way for Schenley Ave.
BOARDMAN
A money-saving and environmentally green technology is being used to repave Schenley Avenue from the Youngstown city limits to Hopkins Road.
Ronyak Paving Inc. of Burton began the two-day job Saturday and expects to finish today, weather permitting.
“I think this is the future of our industry,” said Scott Ronyak, paving superintendent for Ronyak Paving Inc.
The $24,900 repaving job, awarded to Ronyak by the Mahoning County commissioners, is being accomplished using a $2.5 million machine that performs on-site, re-heat asphalt recycling.
The process entails in-place heating, grinding and remixing of 2 inches of asphalt that’s already on the road and adding liquid-asphalt emulsion to it, before re-applying the asphalt to the road and rolling it down.
In this demonstration project, funded by gasoline-tax revenues, this recycling method is being used for the first time for the county engineer’s office.
The two-lane section of Schenley Avenue, where the pavement is being recycled in place, is 2,404 feet long and between 22 and 231/2 feet wide.
The recycling method is 30 percent to 40 percent less expensive than traditional asphalt paving, Ronyak said.
Those cost savings are derived in large part from not having to buy and haul new asphalt from an asphalt plant to the paving site and not having to haul old asphalt away from the road, Ronyak said.
The recycling method also reduces the wear and tear caused by asphalt-hauling trucks on the roads and reduces air pollution from their exhaust, he said.
In the recycling method, Ronyak said, “We’re using exactly what is there, heating it up, adding a rejuvenating agent [the liquid- asphalt emulsion], putting it right back down.” Using the pavement-recycling technology, the road will have the same eight- to 10-year life between pavings as it would between pavings using new asphalt, he said.
At a time when the county engineer’s office is squeezed between declining gasoline-tax and license-plate-fee revenues and high asphalt and fuel costs, this recycling method has the potential to significantly increase the number of road miles the county can pave under its limited budget, said Darren Lydic, operations supervisor for the county engineer’s office.
The reheat, lay-down machine being used on Schenley was first developed by the late Angelo Benedetti Sr. in the 1950s. Early versions of the technology required adding a top layer of new asphalt, but the current 100 percent recycling technology requiring no new asphalt emerged in the mid-1990s.
Angelo Benedetti Inc. of Bedford has sold five of the machines — two to Ronyak, one to the city of Akron and two to purchasers in Mexico, said John Stockwell, Benedetti vice president.
“You’re recycling the asphalt that the county, the city or the township already owns, so you don’t have to buy new materials, and you don’t have to have all the expense and all the dump trucks and the traffic” to and from the paving site, Stockwell said of the advantages of recycling.
“It looks like it’s doing a good job, and it’s not as expensive as planing and repaving, so we’ll see how it holds up and look at it for future jobs,” said Richard A. Marsico, county engineer, as he inspected the work in progress Saturday.