Emulsion

The street is paved with asphalt.

It's polyvinyl acetate emulsion that doesn't dissolve in water once it's dry.

Also, asphalt can create a lot of noise.

Those are called the asphaltenes they're an ingredient in asphalt.

Then you can have a lot of splash water in the asphalt.

The solution for that is to make roads out of porous asphalt.

Look, the tire marks on the asphalt... and the cigarette butt rolling.

It's made of asphalt, and asphalt is a very nice material to drive on, but not always, especially not on these days as today, when it's raining a lot.

The other big dynamic of change is the sheer performance of underperforming asphalt.

So then you have asphalt with very small pieces of steel wool in it.

Even roads are made from asphalt, a petroleum product, as are the roofs of many homes.

And then the asphaltenes and this is the crucial thing the asphaltenes get whipped by the waves into a frothy emulsion, something like mayonnaise.

Now most environmentalists don't say growth is good, because, in our lexicon, asphalt is two words assigning blame.

So these guys were in a worker's gang mixing up asphalt one morning on the side of the highway.

It's a porous asphalt, like I said, so you have only a small amount of binder between the stones.

The mycelium, in the right conditions, produces a mushroom it bursts through with such ferocity that it can break asphalt.

The tears pouring down from the darkening sky are dyeing the asphalt surface black, as though I can peek deeply into its heart.

Tonight's episode Along an isolated stretch of farmland in Northern Nebraska, a construction company builds the sleek asphalt ribbon of a new superhighway.

And Andy and his team discovered that they were going to spend 200 million of those dollars on asphalt to surround the schools themselves.

But if we look at asphalt as our growth, then we realize that all we're doing is destroying the planetary's fundamental underlying operating system.

It can be put up in any environment, from an asphalt parking lot to pastures or fields, because it doesn't require any special setup or specialty tools.

In the Northwest Quadrant of British Columbia, an area of land the size of Oregon, there's one road, a narrow ribbon of asphalt that slips up the side of the Coast Mountains to the Yukon.

What we do is we take a fire hydrant, a no parking space associated with a fire hydrant, and we prescribe the removal of the asphalt to create an engineered micro landscape, to create an infiltration opportunity.

And by presenting a really strong economic case, they convinced the L.A. government that replacing that asphalt with trees and other greenery, that the schools themselves would save the system more on energy than they spend on horticultural infrastructure.

So ultimately, 20 million square feet of asphalt was replaced or avoided, and electrical consumption for air conditioning went down, while employment for people to maintain those grounds went up, resulting in a net savings to the system, but also healthier students and schools system employees as well.

Porous asphalt, a material that we use now in most of the highways in the Netherlands, it has pores and water can just rain through it, so all the rainwater will flow away to the sides, and you have a road that's easy to drive on, so no splash water anymore.