Going global with waste
Arjun Randhawa wrote about plastic roads in his Google Science Fair project
A class IX student from Delhi’s Faith Academy School was looking for a subject for a science project he wanted to submit to the Google Science Fair 2014. When Arjun Randhawa saw Dr R. Vasudevan’s technique of building durable roads with waste plastic on the Don’t Waste Your Garbage episode, he knew this would be the subject of his project. “I Googled Dr Vasudevan and his college, Thiagarajar College of Engineering in Madurai. I got to know about the procedure for building roads out of plastic through images I found on the internet,” he says. “Through the Google Science Fair, people and especially children aged between 13–18, will be able to know about plastic roads and save the environment. The judges will be amazed to know about this kind of innovation from India!”
Arjun’s Project Idea
“The primary question I was investigating is, ‘How to make a real, good use of plastic.’ I started with getting to know how plastic is actually disposed. The answer I got was: landfills, dump yards, burning it, and dumping it outside the city. This was very disappointing. Then I searched on the web for how waste can be reduced, reused and recycled. I got to know that people just melt it and sell it to the junk seller. But just then, I came across another way through which we can convert it into an item which can actually be used in constructing roads. In India, road construction goes on for months largely because the roads tend to get broken and have bumps. Thus, a lot of money is being spent by the government.In such a situation, this method would be like God's gift.”
To see Arjun's project on how plastic can be used to build roads, click here and to download it, click here.