This Indian City Is Doing Something Amazing – Using Plastic Waste For Constructing Roads

Every city in India needs to take a leaf out of Jamshedpur’s book – it is the only city in India which uses plastic waste for constructing roads.

Jamshedpur Utility and Services Company (JUSCO) uses bitumen technology on waste plastic, ranging from polybags to biscuit packets, thus nullifying the problem of disposing plastic in the city.

 

Gaurav Anand, an environmental engineer and the Senior Manager (Quality Assurance) of JUSCO says, “As far as we know, Jamshedpur is the only city in eastern India where bitumen technology (Dry Process) patented by Thiagarajar College of Engineering (TCE), Tirupparankuram, Madurai, has been implemented on accumulated waste plastic for the first time.”

The use of bitumen has been reduced by 7 per cent ever since JUSCO, a 100 per cent subsidiary company of Tata Steel which maintains and provides municipal services in Tata command area of the city, began using waste plastic in road construction work.

The benefits of this technology are:

– the quality and longevity of roads made of waste plastic-aggregate-bitumen is two times better than bitumen road

– costs less as compared to bitumen road

– has no toxic gas emission

– can withstand high temperature and higher load

 

Anand claims that that there is no maintenance cost involved for the first five years, and for every stretch of such one km long and four metre wide road, one tonne of bitumen costing Rs 50,000 is saved. But they have no plans to commercialize it, and are planning on using it to serve the society.

There has been a great demand for this technology from Chattisgarh, Himachal Pradesh, Uttarakhand and Jharkhand governments, and also from Nigeria.

 

Due to this amazing initiative by JUSCO,the steel city will get eco-friendly and durable roads, while dealing with the problem of plastic waste disposal at the same time. They have already constructed 12-15 kms road in the city as well as Tata Steel Works besides widening 22 roads using this environment-friendly technology.

News Source: Business Standard

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