Can waste plastic be turned into roads? NPL, CRRI working on proposal

Have you ever heard of a road that is built of waste plastic? If not, then soon, we will be able to walk on the roads that have 80-90 percent plastic content in it as the National Physical Laboratory (NPL) is working on the process of recycling plastic waste and in fact, has even produced a sample.  NPL along with Central Road Research Institute (CRRI) are working on a proposal that calls for use of waste plastic for road laying and this proposal will be submitted to the Transport Ministry within a week. 

Once approved, use of waste plastic for road laying will definitely help the country to get rid of the mounting crisis of plastic contamination to an extent. In addition, the successful implementation of the project will also help the country to create wealth from waste. 

"Earlier, we were working on solid waste but now have started focusing on recycling of plastic waste. We hope that the road and transport ministry will understand our proposal and give a go-ahead to it. Currently, we have got work from some NGOs and we expect that the government will also cooperate in our endeavour," said Dr Sundeep Kumar Dhawan, Senior Scientists at NPL and chairman of Solid waste management. 

These roads will be developed at far lesser expense when compared to other road building methods available in India at present. Interestingly, the concept of building a plastic road has been there for many years and such roads can be easily located in different parts of Delhi, Bangalore, Karnataka, Chennai, but these roads have used plastic with bitumen, which means plastic was mixed with bitumen. But the new roads that will be built after the proposal is accepted by the ministry will have more plastic content in it - ranging between 80-90 per cent. 

The technology for use of waste plastic for road development was developed by Prof Rajagopalan Vasudevan (73), Professor of Chemistry at Thiagarajar College of Engineering, Madurai. He is also referred as the ‘Plastic Man’ of India. He implemented the use of plastic waste on a road constructed inside the premises of his college in 2002. During the process, he created few blocks with a dimension of 2mm. 

Apart from this, today, plastics are also used in developing several things and few of them are tiles that are used in homes, plastic toilets are being developed among others. 

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A Government order in November 2015 has made it mandatory for all road developers in the country to use waste plastic, along with bituminous mixes, for road construction. This is to help overcome the growing problem of plastic waste disposal in India. 

By Suman Agarwal