Putting plastic waste to good use

The idea of incorporating plastic waste into road construction was pioneered in India over two decades ago. Today, thousands of kilometers of roads have been laid in that country and the idea is being replicated in Africa and Asia - from Ghana to Indonesia. Detractors will always find a way to point out the dangers of using plastic waste, which replaces significant percentages of bitumen in road construction, as a dangerous path to creating more plastic pollution. The arguments revolve around heating up plastic that would release more poisonous gases into the atmosphere. But studies have largely debunked those fears as experience has shown that soft plastic waste requires less heat to soften up the material ready to be incorporated into the road construction material without crossing the heat threshold.
While there are over 50,000-km plastic roads in use in India, Bangladesh is finally beginning to take the first tentative steps in evaluating and incorporating the technology so that it may be used in road construction. Needless to say, that this is an area where the government spends billions of taka every year not just to construct but continually repair the road network. The principal problem with roads constructed in Bangladesh is that the country lacks large quarries of rock and hence its road network is made out of brick chips. Bricks in our country are made with a big percentage of earthen clay. Hence, Bangladesh being both a riverine country that is prone to both heavy rains and flooding is constantly having its roads washed away to the delight of thousands of contractors who can look forward to road repair jobs round the year.
This is a colossal waste of funds from national exchequer. While this has been the modus operandi for decades, today, the country is in the middle of a financial downturn. Austerity measures are being put in effect and the net is widening. Re-use of plastic in road construction takes care of two birds with one stone. First, it reduces the cost of construction (while making it more resilient to floods and rain) and second, it tackles the increasingly impossible task of plastic pollution and waste. The waste concerned here is the type that is overflowing in landfills across the country and clogging up sewerage system, waterways and increasingly making its way into the sea.
Efforts to ban plastic have largely failed because of the convenience they provide. In our consumer-centric societies, plastic rules. Since the material is to stay here, why not use this seemingly endless supply of used and discarded plastic? Well, for starters, the pushback has obviously come from vested interest groups. With a constant slew of repair jobs in the maintenance of roads and highways given out every year, it does not take much imagination as to why the technology has not been widely accepted in our country. That said, given the particular set of financial circumstances prevailing in the economy currently, surely the authorities can see the merit in adoption of a policy on switching to plastic roads.
Having a more resilient rural road system will bring in more votes for public representatives. Given the chance to vote unhindered, experience tells us that the electorate generally opts to elect representatives who have done a lot of development in their constituencies. Keeping that in mind, it can only be hoped that policymakers will do the needful to enact legislation that will incorporate plastic road construction gradually in rural Bangladesh as well because climate-induced weather changes are increasingly making natural disasters more frequent and less predictable. It is time to adopt innovation that has worked globally and forgo the all-encompassing graft mentality in the interest of national development.
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