341: Kelly Mason: Paving The Road For A Better World

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Where Will Your Soul Purpose Lead You?

Kelly Mason

Kelly Mason is an award-winning Director/Cinematographer, mom, Kundalini yoga teacher, healer, and founder of a non-profit organization that builds roads in front of schools in Costa Rica.

She’s also the CEO of the Green Pavement Company, selling recycled road modifiers to construction companies in Central America.

Kelly has produced, directed, and shot hundreds of projects over her 30 years in the film industry. Pave the Road is Kelly’s feature documentary debut of which she has spent nearly a decade producing, directing, and shooting.

Being the driving force of the film, as well as the protagonist, she was able to establish legislation in Central America creating a circular economy mandating the use of plastic waste and all waste materials in the construction of roads, thus making the plastic road technology the expected norm.

What We Discuss With Kelly Mason In This Episode

The divine intervention: Running into Tony Robbins on her street
The message: Attending a yoga retreat in Costa Rica
The calling: Helping kids from getting sick due to dusty roads
An opportunity for innovation: Building roads using carbon-neutral materials
The impact: Creating community outreach programs to get everyone involved
The reach: A potential documentary film entry to the Academy Awards
A new perspective: How the film can give you different perspectives as an individual and a social entrepreneur

Transcript Highlights

Divine Intervention on the Street

Struggling with postpartum depression, Kelly was pushing the stroller down her street one day, depressed. Then Tony Robbins stopped her in the middle of the street and asked if she was okay.

The next day, her Kundalini yoga teacher invited her to join the yoga retreat in Costa Rica that only had one spot left. During the retreat, she received a message from God.

Two and a half years later, not knowing what she was going to do, she remembered the message she got from the retreat. She ended up selling her house and taking her two toddlers and went back to Costa Rica and began getting clients for healing sessions.

Finding Her Soul Purpose

Three months after, Kelly’s new friend asked for her help because her son had an asthma attack that she even had to take her son out of school to keep him away from the road dust.

There are seven schools in the area with the health of over 2,500 children being disrupted by road dust. Everyone that lives there has been very adversely affected by the road dust.

As a result, Kelly spent a decade creating a nonprofit organization that became the voice of the children and the peninsula.

A Carbon-Neutral Solution for Better Paved Roads

The Costa Rican government promised the United Nations to be a carbon-neutral country by 2021. Kelly thought of creating a carbon-neutral solution for the roads. After multiple meetings with all the ministers of environment, energy, infrastructure, education as well as two presidents, she realized that no one was really going to do anything. It takes a very long time to get anything done.

Costa Rica had no waste management system. There are giant landfills but there was no regulation. Waste materials just got into the waterways and rivers. They ultimately ended up going into the Pacific Ocean, which covers a large portion of the Pacific Ocean pollution.

Kelly and her team came up with formulas and a solution that actually works better than a regular paved road. These roads last two to three times longer with these recycled waste modifiers. They use fewer fossil fuels, less bitumen (the oil used in road construction), and they replaced it with waste materials.

Creating Social Impact

With a universal solution in hand, they could then go to the government and ask to pay for the school roads. It’s a circular economy model so it’s something they can really work with on the highways or whatever roadways. It took three years of testing and creating these formulas.

The environmental bill was passed to make the use of recycled waste products mandatory in road construction. On June 23, 2020, six years later, the bill has just been signed into law by the president of Costa Rica.

Kelly was on a soul contract for a purpose where the answers just came one after the other. Every day, something happened which made it all the more fun, although it wasn’t always easy. She met different people along the path that has made it possible for them to bring India’s plastic road technology to Costa Rica.

A Community Effort

They created outreach programs and taught kids how to recycle waste materials so they could teach families how to do so and inspire them that every problem is an opportunity for innovation.

The roads are only expected to last more than two years. They used different types of bases to test everything through their small pilot project. The next step is going back and doing a proper job to make sure those roads will last for many years.

An Effort to Inspire the Whole World

Kelly shot the documentary film about this entire journey. They are now talking to the Film Council of Costa Rica as well as the Cinematography Council to have their documentary film certified and become an entry to the Academy Awards.

It’s a social impact documentary film. It’s about creating change. It’s around innovation and technology and plastic waste, which is one of our biggest crises around the world.

The film also gives you an interesting perspective as a social impact entrepreneur. Things just can’t happen quickly with this type of work. So the film exposes some of the very personal aspects of the entrepreneur innovator like herself.

A Better Alternative to Landfills

Hopefully, the United States would be able to do it as well but this type of technology requires a lot of approval. So it’s a lot easier to do this type of thing in a smaller country like a third world country.

For now, they are working on bringing in more of the waste modifier material into road construction. This is the plastic road revolution. And you will see happening more around the world as it’s a wonderful alternative to landfills.

Episode Resources

Pave The Road Documentary

Connect With Kelly Mason

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Where Will Your Soul Purpose Lead You?