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LANSING — They won't be bouncy but Michigan's next roads are increasingly bound to be made with old tires, including a "road lasagna" technique already used in Ingham County.
State officials announced $2 million in grants last month for a variety of road projects using old tires.
Ingham County received a nearly $38,000 grant, enough to do about 750 feet of road built on top of a shredded tire base at Fitchburg and Parman roads near Leslie.
The projects tend to be small and on local roads. Most big projects use federal funding and tire rubber is considered experimental and generally can't be used on roads that get federal funding, said Kelly Jones, managing director of Ingham County's roads department.
Today's projects generally use rubber in the asphalt mix or rubber as a base and tend to be fairly small in scale, said M. Emin Kutay, an engineering professor at Michigan State University who works on rubber-modified roads.
"Typically our paving industry is slow to new things," he said. "They want to see it long-term first."
Based on his research, Kutay said experiments from the past decade or more are showing good techniques for producing mixes that can make quieter…