MacRebur halfway along road to Seedrs target

MacRebur, a Scottish start-up aiming to turn PCR plastic into road surfaces, has started a crowdfunding drive to raise £590,000 to grow the business.

Richard Branson, billionaire founder of the Virgin Group, has backed MacRebur after it won the Virgin Voom startup competition. Now MacRebur has turned to crowdfunding to push its expansion, offering 7.7 per cent of its equity on Seedrs. The company has so far reached 55 per cent of its target.

The firm makes a bitumen substitute, known as MR6, to mix with standard asphalt. MR6 is made from plastic diverted from landfill. Little more than a year old, MacRebur hopes to produce a quarter of a percentage of the global road surface market, with ambitions to broaden its production to Australia and South Africa.

So far MacRebur has laid MR6 on roads around Cumbria and the Scottish borders, with surfaces at Carlisle Airport, the Caithwaite junction of the A6 and a Cumbria truck stop.

MacRebur said: “[Our] carefully selected plastics, taken from old rubbish, are added into roads to improve strength and durability, whilst reducing the quantity of the oil based bitumen used in a traditional road mix.”