A British company is staking a beach head in North America seeking to convert contractors to using plastic road plate instead of steel for temporary coverage during construction.
Oxford Plastics launched their composite plastic plate system in 2009 and has since gained traction in London, England where local regulations demand all roadwork be wrapped and covered for rush hour in the mornings and evenings.
Wrestling large, heavy steel plates into position is time consuming and demands heavy machinery and an operator. However, Oxford Plastics says its plastic plates can be carried by just two workers and at 42 kilograms are well within the health and safety load limits.
"We had the system in design and when London instituted the Keep London Moving rules which required all contractors to be off the road an hour before rush hour both in the morning and evening we launched," said Peter Creighton of Oxford Plastics.
The company makes a range of road and site products from post base covers, to barriers and fencing to trench covers.
The system won the Innovation Award in the public and roadworks section at the Salon des Maires exhibition in Paris in 2012. The company has since started talks with New York state and city authorities, a general contractors association and utility contractors like Con Edison and National Grid, the gas utility.
"We’ve also had some talks in Toronto and Montreal and we’ve got a reseller of our fencing products in the Niagara area. We haven’t done much else because we need a reseller and we need to ensure it meets all local standards," said Creighton noting the higher end product is — rated for a 96,000lbs truck and complies with the AASHTO HS20-44 standard.
"We’re hoping to get them to start using pedestrian covers first and then introduce America to the road plate system," he said.
Also, he said, the plastic plates are quieter than steel because they have a PVC (Polyvinyl chloride) composite edge which is softer and flexible and thus generates less noise as vehicles pass over it.
The system can handle cuts up to 700 mm, he said, and are compliant with updated U.K. regulations brought in after a couple of fatalities involving road plates. In one case the plate shifted because it was not anchored properly causing a vehicle to drop into the cavity, and in another, it caught the edge of a passing bus as it was being lowered into place.
While the composite plastic used in the system actually gets stronger when colder, Creighton said, there are some additional challenges in North America to be worked out around snow plows since the cover is 72 mm high.
"We’re working with a fencing company in Rhode Island which also snow plows in the winter, he said.
There’s also a hidden side benefit to the plastic cover, said Creighton, in that they have no scrap value unlike steel. Smaller steel covers are often stolen for scrap value he said but not the plastic version.
"No one is interested in a bright yellow chunk of plastic," he said. "Also the steel plates have to get resurfaced but not so with the plastic covers."
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