February 26, 2010

EZ STREET CANADA

EZ Street Canada is looking to develop applications of a polymer-based asphalt mix that can be used in extremely cold temperatures as an alternative to hot mix. While it’s more expensive, there are offsetting savings in crew and less waste, says the proponent.

FEATURE | Roadbuilding

EZ Street Canada develops asphalt mix for use in extreme cold

PETER KENTER

correspondent

Hot mix is often the asphalt of choice for paving projects, but EZ Street Canada is aiming to take a bite out of the market with a cold asphalt paving mix that can be applied without heating at temperatures ranging from minus 18C to 38C.

The product, developed in Florida by the EZ Street parent company, employs advanced polymers that allow the material to be stored indefinitely and applied without additional preparation under a wide range of weather conditions.

Chris Hunt, one of the founding partners of EZ Street Canada, says he first heard about the product after he spent 10 Euros to register the web name EZ.ST in the island nation of Sao Tomé on a whim.

“It was a great web address, but I didn’t really need it, so I decided to contact anyone with a similar business name who might want to take it over,” he says. “Lars Seagren, who founded EZ Street, was the only one to respond, and he told me he’d just been getting grief from his brother Dag about having a web address that was too long. The conversation started there. Within two weeks I had sample material sent to me in Yellowknife and we were testing it with the Northwest Territories (NT) Department of Transportation.”

The material had already been used in climates ranging from Alaska to South America. Hunt was keen to demonstrate to other Canadian jurisdictions what the product could achieve in Yellowknife.

“Our thinking was that if we could prove that it worked here in these conditions, nobody would question using the product anywhere in Canada,” he says.

The initial testing in Yellowknife used the material to patch potholes, repair utility cuts and provide small overlays. “What we were seeing was that we would come back in the spring and 70 per cent of the road was gone, while the patches were still as good as new,” says Hunt.

Among the product’s other attributes: extended storage time, no prep time, smaller crews, no time constraints between laying the asphalt and compaction and little to no waste — all unused product is returned to storage.

The asphalt is custom-mixed according to application and temperature, using local gravel that makes up 95 per cent of the mix. The asphalt is shipped in containers, to be mixed with local aggregate.

“It also goes on thinner than hot asphalt, with about two inches of asphalt compacting to about 1.5 inches,” says Hunt. “It’s like putting a Gore-Tex jacket on the road.”

In 2009, EZ Street Canada sold a half-interest in the company to Nuna Logistics, a company that specializes in the construction of mines, mining roads and remote airports. The product has also expanded to a dozen outlets across Canada.

“We’re partnering with family-owned operations, either pavers, asphalt producers or companies with a number of maintenance contracts,” says Hunt.

In October of that same year, the company demonstrated a full-width paving project on a 60-metre stretch of Highway 3 near Yellowknife at a temperature of minus 8C using material stored at ambient temperature.

“Our test strip continues to perform really well,” says Hunt. “We visit it all the time. The road on either side of it is falling apart, but there’s not a blemish on the test strip.”

The company has since demonstrated on projects at the University of British Columbia and for the City of Mississauga.

Other planned projects include resurfacing the gravel runways in remote mine locations where a new generation of cargo planes requires smoother landing strips.

This year, the NT Department of Transportation has contracted EZ Street Canada to pave up to 50 kilometres of road in the largest application of cold asphalt technology in Canada to date.

“The normal road construction season in Yellowknife runs about eight weeks,” says Hunt. “But we could complete that project well out of season.”

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