Sep 29, 2025
Your Mini Guide to Pitch the Right Surface Treatment
BY AsphaltPro Staff
When you’re a paving contractor, you juggle multiple tasks during a given shift. Depending on the time of day, that can include educating your next client on what treatment their pavement system needs. When you find a property manager whose parking lots and residential streets only need surface treatment, which one do you offer? Here’s a quick cheat sheet of options.
- Cape Seal: This consists of a chip seal treatment covered by either a slurry seal or micro surfacing treatment.
- Chip Seal: This consists of one or more layers of asphalt binder and embedded aggregate.
- Crack Seal: This consists of placing adhesive material into working cracks.
- Fog Seal: This is a single application of emulsified asphalt onto an asphalt surface.
- Microsurfacing: This is a single or double application of a proportioned mix of asphalt emulsion, aggregate, water, mineral filler and additives, uniformly spread across a prepared surface.
- Rejuvenating Fog Seal: This is similar to a fog seal, but it uses rejuvenating emulsions.
- Scrub Seal: This is similar to a chip seal, but the asphalt distributor pulls a type of broom that guides emulsion into cracks.
- Slurry Seal: This consists of a proportioned mix of asphalt emulsion, mineral aggregate, water and additives, spread across the pavement surface at a single-stone thickness.
- Ultra-thin lift HMA: This consists of a hot-mix asphalt treatment (paving-grade asphalt and aggregate) applied at a compacted depth of ¾ to 1 inch thick.
With advancements and innovations taking place all the time, updates and additions to these treatments, including specifications for emulsions and additives, happen at state and municipal levels. What surface-level treatments would you add to this list?
What caveats or warnings would you share with your colleagues about these methodologies when they pitch them to a property manager? Let’s get a conversation going on the AsphaltPro social media channels.
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