It would appear a team in the Netherlands has come up with a partial solution for the 350m t of plastics being used worldwide every year – and in a move that surprises no one, this solution involves cyclists. In autumn 2018, the first “PlasticRoad” premiered in Zwolle. The rather optimistically named 30 m long bike path is a “smart” test track equipped with sensors monitoring temperature, number of bike passages and durability.

The PlasticRoad was made with the equivalent of 500,000 recycled plastic bottle caps. For a little perspective, here’s the rough extrapolated calculation – replacing the 32,000 km cycling infrastructure in the Netherlands would require about 530 bn bottle caps or 1.2m t of recycled PP. Doing the same for the entire 300,000 European cycling infrastructure translates into roughly 11.3m t of recycled plastics. And replacing all the bike paths in the world… perhaps the smart PlasticRoad can calculate that one.