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Take a pristine gully, add 17,000
kilos of plastic milk jugs, soda and detergent bottles. What you
usually get is is a garbage heap. But recently civil and environmental
engineering graduates at Cornell University (New York) have found
a different answer - the Gully Bridge.
Open for use, the 40 foot long bridge, made of environmentally friendly
Ecoboard is produced from plastic waste and reinforced with fibreglass.
Ecoboard, a wood alternative, resembles pressure-treated lumber
and is almost maintenance free. In an industry which does not yet
have design codes or a design manual, traditional wood-design techniques
were adopted to suit the more flexible and denser Ecoboard. The
Gully Bridge is made up of Ecoboard planks, connected with aluminium
and stainless steel fasteners which do not leach chemicals into
the environment as like lumber.
The Bridge's biologically rich site, is sliced
in two by a gully, which in places reaches a depth of 30 feet, allowing
access to about one third of the land that previously was inaccessible.
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