Old Corydon Road in Henderson County just outside the city, is a smooth winding mainly two-lane road.
It’s four years old and still in great condition, and it’s also made from old car tires, at least in part. Kentucky communities have an opportunity to improve their streets and reduce the amount of public tire waste, by building roads similar to this one.
Earlier this month the Commonwealth announced a 2025 grant program to assist communities interested in improving local roadways while also supporting the environment.
Grant applications are wanted for road projects that use rubber-modified asphalt (RMA). This is asphalt with rubber from finely ground waste tires.
Brian Osterman is Director for the Kentucky Division of Waste Management. He said vehicle tire waste is a significant problem in Kentucky.
“Kentucky produces over 4 million waste tires annually, and so we're always battling, trying to keep these out of the environment, whether it be in our streams, out of roadside dumps, and although they're allowed to be in landfills, they do take up a lot of space in landfills.”
Osterman said grants range on average from $75,000 to $165,000 depending on the length of the section they hope to replace.
The RMA grant for overlay awarded to Henderson County was in 2021. Yeager Materials was the contractor and paved 4,400 feet from the intersection of U.S. Highway 60 to the intersection of Highway 425 Bypass. $27,016 was applied for and granted for the materials for this project, according to the Kentucky Energy & Environment Cabinet.
Counties or metro governments can apply for funding for either chip seal or thin asphalt overlay projects.
Osterman said the community would pick two similar sections of road, with similar amounts of traffic.
“And those two sections of road would be put down at the same time, one being using conventional methods, and the other be using the rubber modified asphalt,” he said. “And then we would, we would just do testing and long term monitoring to determine, you know, how that surface is holding up.”
Based on studies RMA is doing well compared to conventional.
He said this program amounts to a long-term experiment in whether RMA will end up in widespread use.
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