A 40-km pilot project of road network made with 50 tonnes of plastic waste has taken shape within Reliance Industries Ltd.’s (RIL) Nagothane township.
Under its sustainability initiative, plastics used by RIL in the construction include end-of-life post-consumer plastics, such as multi-layer films used for packaging of wafers, snacks, flimsy polyethylene plastic bags, flexible polyethylene packaging materials used by e-commerce companies, garbage bags, cling wraps and other flexible plastic products collected from within the township and surrounding areas of Pen taluka.
Vipul Shah, chief operating officer (COO), petrochemicals business, RIL, said, “This is part of RIL’s endeavour to instil sustainability and circularity concepts in everything they do. The roads at Nagothane manufacturing division are a proof of concept that even end-of-life plastics can be utilised in a sustainable manner in creating meaningful and useful assets.”
Mr. Shah declared phase one of their sustainability and circularity initiative project as complete, while commercially launching the Waste Plastic to Road initiative. “We will be happy to share our experience with governments and local bodies across the country to help increase the use of end-of-life plastics for such productive purposes. Apart from being beneficial to the environment, the use of plastics also enhances the quality of roads,” Mr. Shah said.
The Nagothane manufacturing division is part of its petrochemicals complex commissioned in 1989, with various production units producing polyethelene and polypropelene, among other things. The unit records the movement of several hundred tankers driving in and out every day. The adjoining residential area is home to several employees and their families.
The construction of the model roads at began in May 2019 and was completed in just two months. The Raigad area was later witness to torrential rains last season, with Nagothane alone receiving a record 2,500 mm rainfall.
“The newly-built roads were submerged under water for many days, but there has not been any road erosion. Fully-loaded trucks ply on these roads daily, but there has not been a single pothole till date,” Mr. Shah said, pointing to the roads, which RIL plans to pitch to the National Highways Authority of India, municipal bodies and so on over time as specifications become clear.
The inclusion of plastics in the road mix has enhanced its durability and strength as also provided superior bonding among aggregates, lower seepage of water, and lesser erosion, all this resulting in reduced abrasion of tyres. The cost of a kilometre of a road with plastic — 3.5 m wide, 5 cm topping — costs ₹1 lakh less to make as compared to a conventional bitumin-only road.
To make this happen, the innovation team at RIL modified a hot-mix plant to automate and enhance efficiency of the process of mixing end-of-life plastics with bitumen and gravel for road construction. “R&D teams across our manufacturing sites are striving to improve existing products and processes,” Mr. Shah said.
One of the major challenges in the business is collection of such plastic. The extended producer responsibility or EPR, to make the polluter pay, is touted as the way forward. A robust collection system of such plastic will ensure that even types of plastic that do not fetch waste pickers much money, because they cannot be recycled, are put to use for making roads.
The writer was on a visit to Nagothane at the invitation of Reliance Industries Ltd.
.png?w=600)
