A professor from Tamil Nadu, known affectionately as the “Plastic Man of India,” has pioneered a revolutionary and eco-friendly method of road construction that has been utilized to build tens of thousands of kilometers of durable roads across the country.
Dr. Rajagopalan Vasudevan, a Chemistry Professor at Thiagarajar College of Engineering in Madurai, developed a low-cost, effective technology in the early 2000s to combat the mounting problem of plastic waste.
Dr. Vasudevan’s breakthrough was a simple but ingenious one: instead of viewing plastic as toxic waste, he treated it as a “misplaced resource.” His technique involves:
- Shredding common plastic litter (bags, wrappers, foam packaging) into fine pieces.
- Coating the hot gravel (aggregate) used in road construction with a thin film of this molten plastic.
- Mixing the plastic-coated aggregate with heated bitumen (tar).
This “plastic-modified bitumen” mix is used to lay roads. The first plastic road, a 60-ft stretch, was paved within his college campus in 2002 and remains intact today.
The use of shredded plastic in the mix has provided numerous advantages over conventional asphalt roads:
- Enhanced Durability: The plastic acts as a strong binding agent, increasing the road’s load-bearing capacity by up to 100%.
- Water Resistance: The plastic-coated stones prevent water from seeping through, eliminating the formation of potholes and cracks.
- Cost-Effective: It reduces the required quantity of costly bitumen by about 8-10%.
- Environmental Solution: Each kilometer of a single-lane road can consume the equivalent of about one million plastic bags, providing an effective way to dispose of non-recyclable plastic waste.
Since its invention, the technology has been widely adopted. While early estimates placed the total road length built using this method at over 10,000 km, more recent reports suggest that the total length of roads constructed using Dr. Vasudevan’s technique across India has surpassed 1,00,000 kilometers.
Dr. Vasudevan, who was awarded the Padma Shri in 2018 for his contribution, licensed the technology for free to the Indian government, underscoring his commitment to national progress and environmental sustainability.
