Recycled glass in the pavement of Parking Lot 41A caused the surface to glitter under the sunshine Tuesday at the dedication of the 17-stall lot north of the Forestry Greenhouse near the intersection of Pammel Drive and Wallace Road.

Doug Houghton, director of parking services for the Department of Public Safety, said the new parking lot was paved with a mixture of glass and asphalt termed “glasphalt.”

“It’s a more efficient way to use waste glass,” he said. “We don’t have the opportunity [in parking] to be ‘green’ very often.”

The surfacing of the lot was completed in the summer of 2002, but Houghton said the ceremony Tuesday let visitors see how well the pavement has held up during the last nine months.

Warren Madden, vice president for Business and Finance, said the lot “seems to be working well.”

He said the parking lot project was important to Iowa State as “an environmentally sound activity in a place that’s pretty visible.”

Houghton said he learned about the concept of glasphalt at an asphalt-paving conference in the summer of 2001.

Merry Rankin, environmental specialist with the Iowa Department of Natural Resources, spoke at that conference, explaining how glasphalt could take advantage of glass recycling programs to help pavement projects become more environmentally sound.

“Sometimes, you don’t see direct results of [your recycling],” Rankin said. “All of the glass that went into this project was collected through local curbside recycling in Ames.”

Rankin said a pilot project using glasphalt was conducted at the Iowa State Fairgrounds about 30 years ago, but no paving had been done in Iowa using the mixture until recently.

“[Glasphalt] is a way for us to diversify the ways we can use a recyclable product like glass,” she said.

Rankin said more than 20 states have completed projects using glasphalt, and three trails and two parking lots (including Lot 41A) in Iowa have been paved in cooperation with the DNR.

Houghton said support from the DNR, Department of Transportation and Manatt’s, an Ames construction company, made the Lot 41A project one of the most cost-efficient parking projects done on campus in recent years.

“I think we’d be interested in doing this again, especially with [their] involvement,” he said.