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Related: About this forumProfessor of Chemistry Turns India’s Plastic Trash into Useable Roadways
http://www.nationofchange.org/professor-chemistry-turns-india-s-plastic-trash-useable-roadways-1406089132Scenes from the movie Slumdog Millionaire accurately depict Indias 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 countrys 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 Indias trash into treasure is no small undertaking. You cant exaggerate the vastness of the problem there. Jairam Ramesh, the nations former environment minister, has said that if there were a Nobel prize for dirt and filth, India would win it. Almost none of Indias 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
warrant46
(2,205 posts)1. Then the streets could be paved with cow dung
Which the country is also a world leader in
Nihil
(13,508 posts)2. At least that is biodegradable. (n/t)