In what comes as a revolutionary idea, a company from Netherlands has proposed to use plastic for making roads. These roads will be easier to maintain and lay or remove as compared to conventional asphalt.
Roads are very difficult to maintain and need to be relayed a couple of times in a decade, if not more. If roads are not used on a regular interval, demolishing the same also becomes a very big task. VolkerWessels, which is a company based in Netherlands has come up with a rather interesting idea to solve the aforementioned problems. It proposes to produce roads that have been made from nothing but pieces of plastic, interesting isn’t it? Though it sounds very cool initially, the idea has a lot more reason behind it.
The company has said that it will use plastic that is polluting the oceans for the same purpose. Now this idea has a lot going in its favour for sure because it will also help in reducing the amount of plastic waste floating around in Earth’s water bodies as well. Coming to the specific advantages of the proposed road idea, the prefabricated plastic roads firstly will be very easy to install and even dismantle if required. Secondly, they will require lesser maintenance and will be able to withstand extreme temperatures as well. Thirdly, laying asphalt results in emitting 1.6 million tons of carbon dioxide per year and constitutes 2 percent of the total road transport emissions, which can be avoided.
If at all the proposed plan makes it to reality, the first city in the world to feature plastic roads will be Rotterdam because that’s where the idea has been proposed to initialise. According to the city council’s engineering bureau, the idea might be given the go-ahead very soon as well. The city council bureau is very optimistic about the development of plastic roads and Rotterdam has always been open to such experiments and innovative ideas. In addition, Rotterdam also has a ‘street lab’ where innovations such as this can be tested out.
