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Photocatalytic Pavement as an Ecosystem Technology: A Retrofit Pathway to Negative-Carbon Road Systems
Summary
Scientists tested a road coating made with titanium dioxide (a common mineral used in sunscreen) that uses sunlight to break down harmful stuff in the air right where it's created — car exhaust, smog-forming chemicals, and even tiny plastic particles from tires and brakes. The results were striking: up to 61% less CO2, 60% less smog-causing pollution, and nearly complete breakdown of microplastic particles into smaller, less harmful pieces, all without extra machines or land. Since tire and brake microplastics have been linked to respiratory and cardiovascular problems, a road surface that cuts them down
Photocatalytic pavement — road and airfield surfaces incorporating titanium dioxide (TiO 2 ) — targets the diffuse, use-phase, mobile-source emissions that constitute the majority of transportation’s greenhouse-gas footprint. We report independent laboratory and field results for the first commercially scalable retrofit photocatalytic system, which integrates photo-reactive TiO 2 into established pavement-preservation carriers (PlusTi™). Under ambient ultraviolet excitation, TiO 2 drives a non-selective redox cascade — an “artificial photosynthesis” — that mineralizes vehicle-borne CO 2 to durable bicarbonate and oxidizes NO x , VOCs, and tire/brake-wear microplastics. Verified performance includes a 41–61% reduction in CO 2 concentration at fieldspecification dose (>1,000 t CO 2 removed per lane-mile per year), ~60% NO x reduction, 94.8–99.6% microplastic particle-size reduction, and measurable urban-heat-island mitigation. We frame the treated road network as an ecosystem technology (ecotech): a distributed atmospheric-processing surface that performs ecosystem services at urban scale using only ambient solar energy, no machinery, and no land displacement. A companion contribution is methodological — an expansion of lifecycle carbon-accounting boundaries beyond the industry’s cradle-to-gate (A1–A3) convention to a cradle-to-grave framework with a use-phase (Scope 3, Category 11) removal module, supported by published ISO-compliant EPDs and a Measurement, Reporting and Verification (MRV) protocol now in peer review.