Photograph by Chiara Goia
For
as far as the eye can see, there’s stinking, smoking, untreated
garbage. It’s concentrated in the municipal dump, in the South Indian
city of Madurai, but not contained by it. The surrounding fields are
also piled with trash. Stray dogs nibble at mounds of rotting food. The
trees are denuded and covered with shredded plastic, the blue and pink
and yellow bags like some kind of sinister confetti.
The road to
the dump, and beyond it to Madurai’s airport, is like a Hollywood vision
of dystopian ruin: lifeless, black, choked with human refuse. And
that’s why Rajagopalan Vasudevan’s enthusiasm is so jarring. As he makes
his way through the rubbish, he’s like a child on a treasure hunt.
“Wonderful resource,” he says, admiring a jumble of plastic bags,
jerrycans, and torn food packets. “With all this plastic, I could lay
the whole road to the airport.”
It is difficult to exaggerate
India’s garbage problem. Jairam Ramesh, the nation’s former environment
minister, has said that if there were a “Nobel prize for dirt and
filth,” India would win it. As much as 40 percent of the country’s
municipal waste remains uncollected, according to the Organisation for
Economic Co-operation and Development.
Of the waste that is collected,
almost none is recycled. Most of it sits in open dumps such as the one
in Madurai, leaching into the soil and contaminating groundwater. Some
of it is burned, releasing dioxins and other toxic chemicals into the
air.
Much of India’s garbage is made up of plastic—a scourge of the
nation’s new consumer economy. The country’s Central Pollution Control
Board says more than 15,000 tons of plastic waste are generated daily.
Although the nation’s per capita consumption of plastic is low compared
with that of the U.S., it’s expected to double over the next five years
as India continues to develop. This poses huge environmental, social,
and economic challenges. As the Supreme Court of India recently
observed: “We are sitting on a plastic time bomb.”
Vasudevan sees
an opportunity. A professor of chemistry at Thiagarajar College of
Engineering, near Madurai, he insists that plastic gets a bad rap.
Rather than an incipient environmental calamity, plastic, in Vasudevan’s
opinion, is a “gift from the gods”; it’s up to humans to use it wisely.
And he’s devised a way to transform common plastic litter—not only
thicker acrylics and bottles but also grocery bags and wrappers—into a
partial substitute for bitumen in asphalt.
In recent years his
method has been gaining recognition. He’s become known as Plastic Man
and travels throughout India instructing engineers how to apply it. The
college holds a patent for his technique but often licenses it for free.
To date, more than 5,000 kilometers (3,000 miles) of plastic roads have
been laid in at least 11 states. The Central Pollution Control Board
and the Indian Roads Congress, two leading government bodies, have
endorsed the method.
Photograph by Chiara GoiaVasudevan
Almitra
Patel, one of India’s leading experts on garbage, who has advised
several state governments on their waste policies, considers Vasudevan’s
technology a “win-win-win.” It consumes an unwanted and mostly
nonrecyclable resource; it results in stronger roads; and because it
replaces as much as 15 percent of more expensive bitumen in the mix used
to lay roads, the technology also holds the potential to lower the cost
of infrastructure.
She adds that one of the chief advantages of
Vasudevan’s method is that it can accommodate the multilayered wrappings
often used to pack snacks such as chips and cookies. These wrappings
(typically consisting of a layer each of plastic, polyester, and
aluminum) make up an increasingly large volume of waste in the country.
They’re just about impossible to recycle, but they can easily be
shredded and reused in Vasudevan’s roads.
“It’s really a wonderful
situation,” Patel says. “I think it is an absolutely transformational
technology that could clean up India overnight.”
Another advantage of Vasudevan’s method is its simplicity. It
requires no significant technical knowledge and no large investments or
changes to existing road-laying procedures. His whole operation is a
good example of the Indian method known as
jugaad, or “frugal
innovation.”
Jugaad makes a virtue of necessity: It extols the
work-around, the shortcut that uses (and sometimes improves on) limited
resources. “I do it all the Indian way,” Vasudevan says. “What is the
use to spend thousands of rupees when we can do it much more cheaply?”
Vasudevan,
69, spent the first few decades of his career inducting students into
what he calls “the wonders of chemistry” before turning his attention to
plastic in 2001. He’s very much the professor—voluble, digressive, a
little distracted. He laughs easily and is self-deprecating. “Because of
waste,” he jokes about himself, “a waste has become useful.”
His laboratory sits
amid the heavy granite buildings and dusty playing fields of Thiagarajar
College. Students drive around on scooters, the boys in jeans and
T-shirts, the girls in two-piece salwar kameez outfits that
signal modernity.
The lab building is unimposing—more of a shack, with
cracked concrete floors and asbestos roofing. It’s astonishingly
low-tech. The inside smells of tar. It’s here that Vasudevan has
arranged a demonstration of his plastic-to-pavement technique.
As
one of his students, a young man named Ramalinga Chandrasekar, prepares
the demo, Vasudevan sits at a table, in the draft of a rattling floor
fan, and opens a Tupperware box containing shredded plastic and a few
pieces of plastic-coated granite. He runs a couple of stones through his
fingers, caressing them like gems. “Feel it, feel it,” he says,
praising the glossy, slippery finish.
“What is the use to spend thousands of rupees when we can do it much more cheaply?”
Chandrasekar
sets up a gas burner on the floor and places a black cast-iron pot,
like a rounded wok, on the stove. He throws a few granite pebbles in and
starts stirring with a sawed-off PVC pipe.
As Chandrasekar stirs the
stones, Vasudevan checks their temperature with a handheld infrared
thermometer—virtually the only sophisticated piece of equipment in the
lab. (It costs less than $150.) Chandrasekar explains that the optimal
temperature for the mix is about 150C (302F). Lower than that, and the
plastic doesn’t melt evenly; higher, and it can release toxic gases.
When the temperature is just right, Chandrasekar throws in a
couple of handfuls of shredded plastic. Vasudevan looks over his
shoulder. “It’s not well done. It’s not well done,” he mutters, picking
up a metal slotted spoon to stir the mixture himself.
In the early
days, Vasudevan says, he would mix plastic directly into liquid tar,
stirring until the plastic melted. He found, however, that while the
method worked with small samples in the lab, it was difficult to stir
the large quantities of thick, viscous tar used on an actual road.
When
he began experimenting with what he calls the dry method—in which the
plastic is melted directly onto the stones—he found that the plastic
adhered better and more uniformly.
This reduced air pockets in the tar
and limited water penetration—contributing to stronger roads. He
estimates that he conducted more than 400 experiments before getting his
technique right.
It takes another minute, but the plastic begins
to coat the stones to his satisfaction. Chandrasekar adds a ball of
bitumen; it dissolves and flattens, like a black omelet.
When the stones
are dark, covered with tar, Vasudevan scoops them out and holds them
under my nose. “You see, you see?” he asks, triumphantly. He is a proud
cook. “What a beautiful coating.”
-
Courtesy Rajagopalan Vasudevan
Shred grocery bags and other low-quality plastic
-
Courtesy Rajagopalan Vasudevan
Add gravel
-
Courtesy Rajagopalan Vasudevan
Stir in tar
-
Courtesy Rajagopalan Vasudevan
Bake at 302F so mixture coats gravel
-
Courtesy Rajagopalan Vasudevan
Spread in an even layer, as shown in Madurai in 2013
After he perfected his method, Vasudevan recalls, he faced
difficulty getting it implemented. It wasn’t until 2004, when he got a
chance to display his work in front of the chief minister of Tamil Nadu,
the state in which he lives, that he achieved a breakthrough.
She was
impressed and directed that 1,000 kilometers of plasticized asphalt
should be laid in the state, the first of the 5,000 kilometers since
completed.
Yet for all the progress he’s made, solving India’s
garbage problem requires more than a technological solution. In a
country where throwing garbage onto the roads and littering in public
areas are acceptable behaviors, it’s going to require a social
transformation. “With respect to the technology it has been proven
already,” Vasudevan says. “Culture is now the most important part.”
The
shed is in a residential area of Madurai. It overlooks a canal clogged
with plastic bags—a familiar, dismal sight. Vasudevan has brought me to
the offices of a small women’s association, a self-help group that has
in recent years been collecting and recycling plastic waste.
The
blue-tiled room is stacked with bags containing colorful shreds of
plastic. On a wall, a gold frame contains images of a mosque, Ganesh,
and Jesus, side by side. It’s in places such as this, Vasudevan says,
that the most important work on India’s garbage crisis is being done.
Gurusamy
Bodhilakshmi, secretary of Naganakulam Panchayat-Level Federation of
the SHGs (self-help groups), explains how the women buy plastic from a
network of local businesses and homes and how they conduct awareness
drives in schools and colleges.
They are trying to build a local market
around plastic, so it is treated as a commodity rather than as garbage.
The group has had some success. It collects plastic from about
8,000 households. It buys plastic at 7 rupees a kilo (12¢ per 2.2
pounds) and sells about 1,000 kilos a month, at 30 rupees a kilo, to
government agencies that use it for roads. Many of the group’s members
make a modest living off the enterprise.
Bodhilakshmi’s words are encouraging, but the scale of the
challenge is daunting. Although 8,000 households work with her group,
many more are indifferent or even hostile to their efforts.
Bodhilakshmi
says many families, especially among the better-off, are unwilling to
recycle or think about what happens to their waste. For them, garbage is
a problem of the poor.
“The upper classes have everything. They
have servants to attend to their needs, so they don’t bother with
anything,” she says. “Though we are doing work that is sacred, some
people look down at us as if we are doing dirty work. They speak
disrespectfully to us.”
Vasudevan interjects. “What I always say
is, let us just ignore the upper classes and the middle classes,” he
says. “They are the biggest obstacle. Let us start with people like
this, who are more sincere, and once these people are successful, the
movement will spread.”
He says that in his college, he’s often the
only one who will bend down and pick up a piece of litter from the
ground (“even though I am a dean,” he adds).
Other staff and students
think it’s beneath them. They just throw garbage onto the floor and
expect someone else to pick it up. When he tries to correct his
students, they tell him that others will mock them if they start picking
up waste. “Humility is essential if we want to solve this problem,”
Vasudevan says. “Without humility, nothing can be done.”
The women
of the self-help group line up and show off a folder with news
clippings about their work. Then they give a demonstration of a cleaning
machine they use to remove dust and debris from plastic.
As plastic
bags whip around in the machine, Vasudevan talks about the economic
barriers that stand in the way of large-scale adoption of his method,
such as inefficient markets for plastic and contractors who may not
believe it’s in their best interest to build more sustainable roads.
“I
have to discover a technology not only to change the use of plastic,”
he says, running his hand through his thinning hair and smiling, “but
also to change human minds.”
Image By: Nestle Waters North America Nestle Waters' Brian Flaherty at the U.S. State Department's "Our Ocean" conference.
U.S. State Department hosted two-day conference earlier this week which
saw new executive actions announced to protect the oceans and cut
marine pollution.
