Govt to explore plastic waste to construct road layers

Indunil HEWAGE

The government in collaboration with the Central Environmental Authority will look at possibilities to construct road layers by converting contaminated plastics into various scientific substances.

The Central Environmental Authority’s National Post Consumer Plastic Waste Management Project, Project Director Bandula Sarath Kumara said that this would improve the quality of the local road system. Today, plastic waste in Sri Lanka has become a major problem and recycling contaminated plastic would be an ideal solution to address the problem.

Currently, Sri Lanka has two state owned waste collecting centres in Balangoda and Kurunegala and another two centres in Matara and Anuradhapura will be opened this year. Domestic plastics processing industry is presently around 140,000 metric tons per annum with an average growth rate of around 10-12 %. Sri Lanka is exporting plastic products to large number of countries around the world.

However USA is the dominant buyer of plastic exports over the past number of years. Nearly 40 % of the total exports go to the USA market.

Currently, there are 400 companies in Sri Lanka engaged in plastics processing for both domestic and international markets. A total Rs 15 billion has been invested in the industry. Almost 50 % of this has come through Foreign Direct Investments.

The industry processes many commodity plastics and engineering plastics using modern technologies.