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Freedom251 › Blog › asphalt

Houston’s 1974 Incinerator-Ash Road: What Three Years of Testing Found

By Freedom251 Team · · 3 min read

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Houston built a roughly 200-foot demonstration road section in 1974 using residue from its Holmes Road municipal incinerator in place of the aggregate in an asphalt base. After three years, the study reported that the ash-based base performed excellently and almost identically to an adjacent conventional section. The result describes one short test section over a defined evaluation period—not the road’s condition today or proof that incinerator ash works for every road.

What Houston built in 1974

The City of Houston contracted for the demonstration on Bingle Road near the old Hempstead Highway. Brown and Root constructed the approximately 200-foot test section using residue from the Holmes Road incinerator. Its six-inch bituminous base was covered with a conventional hot-mixed asphaltic concrete wearing surface. A conventional aggregate bituminous base next to it provided a comparison. The project details are reported in the Texas Transportation Institute’s 1979 study, Performance of Incinerator Residue in a Bituminous Base.

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In other words, the experiment did not put loose ash on the road surface. It used ash in the bound base layer beneath an ordinary asphalt wearing course.

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What “89% waste” means

The 89% figure is the incinerator ash’s share of the complete mixture by weight. The EPA’s 1992 report gives the recipe as 89% ash, 9% asphalt cement, and 2% lime. The FHWA’s later table describes the aggregate fraction as 100% ash, with asphalt cement and lime added separately. Both descriptions can be true: all of the mixture’s aggregate was ash, while ash made up 89% of the total weight once binder and lime are included.

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These are proportions for the Houston test material, not a general statistic for ash-based roads. The EPA report, Report to Congress: A Study of the Use of Recycled Paving Material, also reports the three-year performance finding.

What the three-year comparison found

The study said the ash-based asphalt base performed excellently and almost identically to the adjacent conventional asphalt pavement section after three years in service. That is evidence that this particular demonstration was buildable and performed comparably over the period reported. It is not a full lifecycle analysis, a comparison of costs or emissions, or proof of performance under every climate, traffic load, ash composition, or road design.

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The original 1979 paper stated: “The pavement has been evaluated for three years and will be evaluated yearly for another three years.” That sentence records a plan for continued evaluation; it does not establish that the later evaluations occurred.

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Why ash-based road material is not a simple substitute

Later FHWA guidance explains that ash composition and handling can complicate asphalt production and use. For bituminous base applications, it identifies several practical considerations:

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  • Asphalt absorption: High organic content can cause high or uneven absorption of asphalt, making the required binder amount less predictable.
  • Fines and dust: A high fines content can increase asphalt demand and create dusting during handling.
  • Moisture and drying: Wet ash needs careful temperature control during drying.
  • Application layer: FHWA characterized base-course applications as generally better suited to ash than wearing-course applications.

These points appear in FHWA’s 1997 MSW Combuster Ash – Asphalt Concrete guidance. They help explain why the Houston result should be read as a specific engineering demonstration, not a universal recipe.

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What the evidence does—and does not—say about broader use

FHWA also discusses incinerator ash in granular base, including a separate Houston project in 1977. It notes possible advantages such as stability and low unit weight, alongside limited durability under heavy equipment loading and environmental questions involving trace metals and soluble salts. The guidance calls environmental suitability an issue that needs resolution; it does not establish that the 1974 Bingle Road section caused harm. See MSW Combuster Ash – Granular Base – User Guideline.

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The 1974 test therefore supports a narrow conclusion: the ash-based bituminous base reportedly performed similarly to the neighboring conventional base over the first three years. The cited sources do not establish regulatory approval for present-day use, suitability for roads everywhere, a broad environmental benefit, or the current condition of the Bingle Road section.

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