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eridani

(51,907 posts)
Thu Jul 24, 2014, 06:17 AM Jul 2014

Professor of Chemistry Turns India’s Plastic Trash into Useable Roadways

http://www.nationofchange.org/professor-chemistry-turns-india-s-plastic-trash-useable-roadways-1406089132

Scenes from the movie Slumdog Millionaire accurately depict India’s latest consumer-influenced economy. Tree groves are littered with a rainbow color of plastic bags like some kind of ominous carnival wreckage. Plastic bottles, candy wrappers, and other ‘garbage’ liters the streets in a land where city officials have long forsaken their duties of providing a pristine infrastructure to its inhabitants, but a professor of chemistry in Madurai, India thinks that the trash lining his country’s roads and fields could be utilized as a ‘wonderful resource,” transforming common plastic liter, from thicker acrylics to bottles and grocery bags, into a substitute for bitumen in asphalt.

The ‘Plastic Man,’ as Rajagopalan Vasudevan is known in India, travels throughout the country instructing engineers how to apply his technology to recycle the trash copiously littering streets from Punjab to Tamil Nadu. To date, more than 3000 miles of plastic roads have been laid in at least 11 states.

For someone to literally turn India’s trash into treasure is no small undertaking. You can’t exaggerate the vastness of the problem there. Jairam Ramesh, the nation’s former environment minister, has said that if there were a “Nobel prize for dirt and filth,” India would win it. Almost none of India’s trash is currently recycled. Just as a comparison, the US farmers in California have sent over 50,000 to 75,000 tons of trash to be recycled in China, but they too are now refusing our trash because the country is also drowning in plastic. India simply represents a global epidemic of plastic trash pile-up.
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Professor of Chemistry Turns India’s Plastic Trash into Useable Roadways (Original Post) eridani Jul 2014 OP
Then the streets could be paved with cow dung warrant46 Jul 2014 #1
At least that is biodegradable. (n/t) Nihil Jul 2014 #2
Yup warrant46 Aug 2014 #3
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