In a move towards building environment-friendly roads, a new road building technique for the 21st century is advancing fast in the country. Since 2015, the Green Road has blacktopped roads in more than four districts, using plastic wastes.
The 150 meters stretch of road in Olakha in Thimphu was blacktopped using a mixture of 10 per cent plastic and rest, bitumen in 2015. It was also the first road in the country where plastic wastes were used for paving roads. Three years down the line and it required no maintenance and is free of potholes.
“The foremost mission of the Green Road is to segregate all the waste plastic from the landfill across the country, now we have about 40 landfills in the country so we want to extract as much plastic as we can and once we do that, we make space for other biodegradable waste,” Rikesh Gurung, the founder of The Green Road, said.
At least 300 kilograms of plastics are collected from Memelakha landfill every day for free. It is then transported to their factory in Bjemina. It has the capacity to process one thousand kilograms of plastic waste daily.
Plastic wastes are first shredded and then mixed with hot aggregate. It is then mixed with bitumen, which then forms a compound called polymerised bitumen used to blacktop roads. Ten per cent of this material is plastics. It is also cost saving because of less or no maintenance at all. The expected life span of roads built with this material is five years.
“So till date, we have covered about 56 kilometres. The biggest project that we have got so far is Haa road connecting Haa to Samtse which is about 80 kilometres and once it’s complete, about 380 tons of plastic will be utilized in that road only,” Rikesh Gurung said.
And that is approximately 40 truckloads of plastics. The Department of Roads (DoR) found that the quality is good. The Green Road will soon start their work on the old Yangchenphug road and more might be on the way.
