Nepal explores paving with plastic

Vehicles rushing alongside a clean, black-colored avenue in Nepal’s Pokhara are additionally driving over heaps of discarded plastic, reworked into an ingredient in highway development.

Nepal’s city areas generate about 5,000 tonnes of strong waste per day, based on the World Financial institution, of which 13 p.c is plastic waste dumped in landfills.

Whereas high-value plastics, like bottles, are absorbed by the recycling industrylow-value plastics—comparable to multi-layered packaging—pose a big problem as a result of they do not match right into a single recycling class.

For a bunch of younger Nepali entrepreneurs, the huge accumulation of this low-value plastic waste introduced a possibility.

“A plastic road can use even low-value plastics,” mentioned Bimal Bastola, founding father of Inexperienced Highway Waste Administration, the group main the initiative in Nepal.

“We noticed scope for such plastics to be utilized as a uncooked materials, partially substituting bitumen in road construction.”

Discarded packages of noodles, biscuits and different snacks transfer alongside a conveyor belt at their trash-sorting middle.

The divided plastic is then put into machines to be shredded into high quality items.

Because the early 2000s, neighboring India has been main the world in constructing a community of plastic roads, even making the utilization of plastic waste obligatory on roads close to giant cities in 2015.

A rising variety of nations are experimenting with it, together with close by Bhutan and Bangladesh.

In conventional highway development, bitumen is the binding materials, a tarry oil product blended straight with sizzling aggregates earlier than paving a highway.

The plastic highway technique, nonetheless, first coats the aggregates with shredded plastic earlier than including bitumen.

“This method reduces the need for fresh raw materials, lowers costs, prevents water infiltration and increases road lifespan,” Bastola mentioned.

Research present that roads paved with plastic waste might be twice as sturdy as regular roads.

‘Scale up’

Globally, solely 9 p.c of plastic waste is recycled, whereas 19 p.c is incinerated, and practically half leads to managed landfills, based on the Group for Financial Cooperation and Growth (OECD).

Left unchecked, the manufacturing of artificial polymers—the constructing blocks of plastics—is anticipated to succeed in about 1.2 billion tonnes yearly by 2060.

The plastic that accumulates within the surroundings is non-biodegradable, takes tons of of years to decompose and breaks down into tiny microscopic particles.

And whereas Nepal banned single-use plastic luggage thinner than 40 microns, that ban will not be strictly carried out.

For Bastola, growing plastic highway development is vital to creating the recycling of low-value plastics economically viable.

His group says about two tonnes of shredded plastic is used to construct a kilometer of highway.

Thus far, the group has accomplished about 10 initiatives totaling a bit of over 1.5 kilometers (one mile).

“It is happening at a small scale, we need to scale up,” Bastola mentioned. “We have to make government-level projects and we are trying to work closely with the department of roads.”

A pilot project is deliberate this 12 months within the capital Kathmandu at a serious intersection.

“Nepal is keen on testing this technology through pilot projects,” mentioned Arjun Nepal, an engineer with the Kathmandu highway division.

“But to take it forward, we need government-led standards to ensure quality.”

The World Financial institution says life cycle analyses of plastic roads are restricted and it’s nonetheless not clear what environmental impacts—if any—recycled plastics could have when utilized in highway development.

“While initial anecdotes and pilot studies show promise, further research is needed to measure emissions during production, evaluate microplastic release over time and determine how these roads behave once they are decommissioned,” mentioned Valerie Hickey, world director of the World Financial institution’s local weather change group.

Regardless of these considerations, environmentalist Bhushan Tuladhar mentioned that plastic roads current an essential alternative for Nepal.

“It is a low-hanging fruit to address two problems simultaneously—the need for strong roads and the management of plastic waste—for a developing country like Nepal,” he mentioned.

© 2025 AFP