How an Indian professor has converted hazardous plastic waste into roads.

As the world is collectively campaigning to ditch plastic – from Mumbai where plastic bags and bottles are banned, to the UK where factories are opening to supply restaurants with paper straws instead of plastic ones – a chemistry professor in India has shed a positive light on the heavily-slandered material.          

Dr Rajagoplan Vasudevan has come forward to state that “plastic isn’t the problem, we are.” The chemistry professor was awarded with the highest civilian award in India for his ground-breaking efforts in finding sustainable uses for the supposedly toxic material. He has stated that this idea had been in the pipelines since he began experimenting in 2001, at the Thiagarajar College of Engineering in Madurai, where he works.       

                                                      
He was prompted to find a good use to plastic after hearing that communities wanted to eradicate it completely. He has since claimed that plastic is indispensable to poor families in India, and that banning the material completely could “severely affect the quality of life for a low-income family.” 

Dr Vasudevan, who is roughly as old as the invention of plastic itself, began conducting a series of experiments in order to discover alternative uses to the allegedly harmful material, other than dumping it in our seas and landfills. 
What he found was that molten plastic, when combined with another material called bitumen, can act as a great binder, as both materials have similar properties. Bitumen, although having similar characteristics to those of plastic, is black and tar-like in nature, and is used in India together with gravel as a road-paving agent. 

Dr Vasudevan uncovered that the bitumen-induced plastic proved to be highly advantageous when paving roads. He deduced that it could be used to strengthen the Indian streets by making them more durable, as well as less pothole-prone. Furthermore, he found that the hard rubber nature of molten plastic brought along with it an important impermeable factor, sheltering the Indian roads from rainfall, which could ultimately have severe structural repercussions. 

After being endorsed by the late Indian president Dr Abdul Kalam, Dr Vasudevan paved the first plastic road on campus, and was given the licence to keep progressing with his works in 2006. Since then, almost 10,000 kilometres of Indian road have been surfaced using the bitumen-modified substance. 

An assistant at Dr Vasudevan’s workshop explains how the shredded plastic is scattered over heated asphalt, over which the heated bitumen is then added. Dr Vasudevan goes on to explain how a road typically requires 10 tonnes of bitumen per kilometre to be paved. Utilising his creation, plastic can substitute up to one 1 tonne of bitumen, reducing the amount of bitumen generally used to lay a road by 6-8%. 

Dr Vasudevan has also stressed the point that because the plastic is melted at 170C, it is not producing any toxic gasses, as the latter would only be emitted if the plastic is melted at temperatures soaring above 270C. 

Polymer science expert Dr Noreen Thomas has criticised the concept, arguing that while it has solid potential, one needs to be warned that most non-recyclable plastic contains mixed materials, some of which may not have properties sustainable enough to amalgamate well with Dr Vasudevan’s mixture. Nonetheless, 8600km of Indian road have already been completed, and at least another 4400km have been sanctioned as well. 

Dr Vasudevan has sought to broaden his horizons, expanding towards using this fusion as building material. He has applied the same process to merge molten plastic with materials like limestone and granite, producing environmentally-friendly houses and other edifices. He has nicknamed his conception “plastone”, and has stated that each plastone block requires nearly 300 plastic bags together with four to six plastic bottles in order to be shaped. 

Dr Vasudevan is receiving numerous help from several organisations around the nation, and hopes that his eco-friendly and cost-effective fabrication will spread throughout the country, and subsequently the world, like wildfire. 
Almitra Patel, a member of India’s supreme court committee for solid waste management has stated that this technology has the potential of “leaving almost nothing for final disposal.” 

Dr Vasudevan’s aim is to stress his vision of plastic being viewed not as the enemy, but as the world’s “biggest resource.”