Single-use plastic is going to be used in the construction of roads spanning 1,500 km in the Indian state of Uttar Pradesh, the state government has decided. The authority has the end of the current financial year as the deadline.
Media reports suggest that the move will not only set an environmentally conscious image for the state but also help in getting rid of around 2,000 tonnes of single-use plastic. The entire project will be looked over by the public works department (PWD), reported Times of India
Nitin Ramesh Gokarn, the principal secretary of PWD, spoke with the daily to confirm that the use of plastic waste in the road construction has been included in the schedule of rate (SOR) which means that the team is already trying to calculate the cost of including plastic waste in the project. This is also needed as the price of other raw material and human labour has surged in the past couple of years.
Gokarn added that they had initiated the project in the state last year with the construction of 12 roads across the region on a pilot basis. As the results were satisfactory, the PWD is now going ahead with the plan of erecting a 1500 km road. He added that the body will be only expanding their target in the upcoming years. “We will gradually increase the target in future”.
Starting ahead with the current target, PWD has already given the nod for constructing 75 roads across a distance of 94 km. Work has been started on 32 roads with a combined length of 43 km. With this, the team has also managed to use nearly 63 tonnes of plastic waste thereby helping India answer its garbage crisis.
Constructing roads using plastic waste is not a novel step, however, before this, roads have been built in various parts of India using single-use plastic waste. This is because, in 2015, the Government of India made it mandatory for all road developers in the country to use plastic waste for road construction. Rajagopalan Vasudevan, a professor from Madurai’s Thiagarajar College of Engineering, had devised a feasible way of doing this and made the initiative a reality.
Chennai, Pune, Jamshedpur and Indore have seen successful roads getting constructed in the last ten years using the same technology. Lucknow was the latest city to get a road construction project and the road will be stretching from Gomti Nagar Police Station to Indian Institute of Management, Lucknow.
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