All The Cities in India That Use Plastic Waste to Construct Roads - Lucknow, Chennai, Pune and More

In its first, Lucknow is constructing a road out of plastic waste to curb environment pollution due to plastic. The project has been undertaken by Lucknow Development Authority (LDA), which will construct a road using plastic waste, stretching from Gomti Nagar Police Station to Indian Institute of Management (IIM), Lucknow. While this is the first such development in Uttar Pradesh, India is not new to this concept. Many Indian cities have adopted this initiative long back.

In 2015, the Government of India made it mandatory for all road developers in the country to use plastic waste for road construction. This proposal came in effect after Rajagopalan Vasudevan, a professor from Madurai’s Thiagarajar College of Engineering, laid out a process of building roads by recycling plastic waste. Since then, these cities have used plastic waste to construct roads.

1. Chennai: While the plastic roads may be a new concept in many parts of India, Chennai has been experimenting with it since 2011. Chennai has used nearly 1,600 tonnes of plastic waste to construct 1,035.23 kilometres length of roads in recent years, which include N.S.C Bose road, Halls road, Ethiraj Silai Street and Sardar Patel Street.

2. Pune: Using bitumen technology on waste plastic, the Pune Municipal Corporation constructed a 150-metre stretch of Bhagwat lane at Navi Peth near Vaikunth Crematorium in 2016. The other trial patches in Pune include Dattawadi Kaka Halwai Lane, Katraj Dairy, Magarpatta City HCMTR Road, Kavde Mala Road, Koregaon Park Lane No 3 and Yeravada Sadal Baba Darga Road from Chandrama Chowk.

3. Jamshedpur: Jamshedpur Utility and Services Company (JUSCO), which is a subsidiary company of Tata Steel, constructed a 12-15 kms road in the steel city as well as Tata Steel Works using plastic road, including a nearly 1km stretch in Ranchi, 500m stretch each in Dhurwa and Morabadi, 3km of roads in Chas and Jamtara each and 500m stretch in Giridih.

4. Indore: Dating 2014, the Madhya Pradesh Rural Road Development Authority (MPRRDA) has constructed around 35 km of roads in 17 districts with plastic waste.