Golpara: Roads made of shredded plastic are becoming a popular solution in managing plastic waste and Golpara district of Assam has resonated with the aforesaid idea making it a reality.
The environmentally conscious approach to construct road out of plastic waste was developed in response to the growing problem of plastic litter in the district.
Along with the problem of plastic litter, Goalpara has also been facing a scarcity of road construction materials and since then the administration has been looking for green technologies to continue with the construction.
A project has been undertaken by the Public Works Department (PWD) of Goalpara, which will construct a road using plastic waste stretching at a length of 75 kilometres.
According to reports, 45 km out of 75 km road has been constructed with 37,260 kg of plastic waste imported from Surat while the other 30 km will be constructed using locally collected plastic waste.
The contractor of the project, Dharmeswari Kachari has expressed deep satisfaction over this alternative idea of constructing road and has claimed polymer roads to be surprisingly durable as compared to bitumen roads.
Banjit Adhikary, sub-divisional officer of PWD said, "The construction of road out of plastic is a good step to curb environment pollution due to plastic."
The National Rural Infrastructure Development Agency (NRIDA), had sanctioned the construction of the 565-km road in Goalpara, which is also in NITI Aayog's 115 'aspirational districts' aiming to improve the socio-economic status of the area through effective convergence of central and state government schemes, collaboration among citizens and governments and competition among districts.
"NITI Aayog has declared 115 backward districts and Goalpara is one of them. The connectivity in Goalpara district was 49% in April 2018 and the basic module of NITI Aayog is to improve connectivity in rural areas. This is the reason the government is keeping an eye on the development of the district," he added.
"Although the government of India had sanctioned the construction of the 565-km road in Goalpara, but the Supreme Court had ceased import of road construction materials into the district as a preventive measure. Therefore, we started exploring alternative green technologies to resume construction. Goalpara is an aspirational district and we cannot afford to halt connectivity projects," the officer maintained.
