Skip to Content

Permeable Parking

September 1, 2001

Rainwater running off of a concrete or asphalt parking lot carries oil and other contaminants into storm drains, fouling waterways. New “permeable pavement” designs from North Carolina State University could make parking lots less polluting.

Construction proceeds in layers. A water-permeable polymer fabric is laid over a gravel base. Then heavy-duty interlocking plastic rings are embedded in sand layered over the fabric. More sand tops the whole structure. Rain filters down through the lot rather than running off of it; pollutants are carried into shallow ground water where microbes break them down. Researchers have been studying a city-owned lot in Kinston, NC, for two years and plan to construct another in Wilmington, NC. Bill Hunt, a North Carolina State water management engineer working on the projects, says that the design should be less prone to potholes than earlier efforts with porous asphalt. Although not durable enough for busy parking lots (think McDonald’s), the new pavement could serve well in daily or long-term lots like those at airports. Hunt says other local governments, as well as homeowners, have expressed interest.

Keep Reading

Most Popular

The inside story of how ChatGPT was built from the people who made it

Exclusive conversations that take us behind the scenes of a cultural phenomenon.

How Rust went from a side project to the world’s most-loved programming language

For decades, coders wrote critical systems in C and C++. Now they turn to Rust.

Design thinking was supposed to fix the world. Where did it go wrong?

An approach that promised to democratize design may have done the opposite.

Sam Altman invested $180 million into a company trying to delay death

Can anti-aging breakthroughs add 10 healthy years to the human life span? The CEO of OpenAI is paying to find out.

Stay connected

Illustration by Rose Wong

Get the latest updates from
MIT Technology Review

Discover special offers, top stories, upcoming events, and more.

Thank you for submitting your email!

Explore more newsletters

It looks like something went wrong.

We’re having trouble saving your preferences. Try refreshing this page and updating them one more time. If you continue to get this message, reach out to us at customer-service@technologyreview.com with a list of newsletters you’d like to receive.