The moment we hear the word plastic, we consider it as a waste, but in reality, it is a resource that can be reproduced, that can be redesign. I believe burning plastic is actually losing the resource. So we have to develop a process to avoid its wastage, by finding ways to build and regenerate plastic.

According to the research 70% of chemical goes to make plastic and 90% of volatile chemicals are used in making plastic as well. There is a study done in a factory in which women?s producing plastic stuff by melting it in an open container had five times higher than the average propensity of breast cancer, so if you burn plastic this plastic just putting these chemicals into the atmosphere. We are taking them, having them in a technical nutrients cycle that we can?t control to going into ecosphere.

Now the question arises, what can India do with the millions of tons of plastic the country is chocking in? We can?t simply say ban it. We have to find an appropriate utilization like we can convert in to fuel and use it to construct the road.

The chemistry professor Vasudevan from Madurai came up with a novel idea to use plastic to build Road from recycled plastic waste. The road has definitely become a very good substitute because it consumes a large amount of the material. It is a possibility that could cut waste and create jobs. Vasudevan tested out his concept in 2001 at Thiagarajar College of engineering where he teaches. That has earned Vasudevan the title of India Plastic man. The idea is simple plastic is collected from dumps and ground into fragments. It is then mixed with asphalt accounting for about 8% of the final value. This mixture makes the roads more resistant to heat and rain. The idea was put into practice by the Tamil Nadu government and has since been used in the state like Karnataka, Karla, Himachal Pradesh, Maharashtra. While Vasudeva?s college holds the patent for this innovation, its licensed for free to Indian states. More than 30000km of India?s roads have already been paved using plastic.

 Now the other option could be the construction of roads, Dehradun based Indian Institute of Petroleum (IIP), a constituent laboratory of the Council of Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR) in 2014, developed a unique process of converting plastic waste like polyethylene and polypropylene, both together accounting for 60 percent of plastic waste, can be converted to either gasoline or diesel. The technology is capable of converting 1 kg of plastic to 750 ml of automotive grade gasoline. Due to nearly nil presence of Sulphur in the produced fuel, IIP?s plastic converted to fuel is pure and meets the Euro-III standards. IIP also stated that a vehicle using this fuel would be able to run for at least two kilometers more per liter. The technology was developed by IIP after nearly a decade of research in hope of commercializing it for industrial usage. Though slow, progress is being made on the waste to fuel conversion front in India. Unfortunately, despite the big strides in waste management, extensive setting up of waste to fuel plants across the country is still awaited. The technologies employed to convert plastic waste to fuel are not complicated to replicate, and if done so on a large scale, will only help in addressing the growing issue of India?s plastic waste.