POKHARA: Cars speeding along a smooth, black-coloured street in Nepal`s Pokhara are also driving over heaps of discarded plastic, transformed into an ingredientin road construction.

Nepal`s urban areas generate about 5,000 tonnes of solid waste per day, according to the World Bank, of which 13 per cent is plastic waste dumped in landfills. While high-value plastics, lilce bottles, are absorbed by the recycling industry, low-value plastics such as multilayered packaging pose a significant challenge because they don`t fit into a single recycling category.

For a group of young Nepali entrepreneurs, the vast accumulation of this lowvalue plastic waste presented an opportunity. `A plastic road can use even lowvalue plastics,` said Bimal Bastola, founder of Green Road Waste Management, the organisation leadingthe initiative in Nepal.

`We saw scope for such plastics to be utilised as a raw material, partially substituting bitumen in road construction.

Discarded packages of noodles, biscuits and other snacks move along a conveyor belt at their trash-sorting centre. The divided plastic is then put into machines to be shredded into fine pieces.

Since the early 2000s, neighbouring India has been leading the world in building a network of plastic roads, even making the usage of plastic waste mandatory in roads near large cities in 2015.

A growing number of countries are experimenting with it, including nearby Bhutan and Bangladesh. In traditional road construction, bitumen is the binding material, a tarry oil product mixed directly with hot aggregates before paving a road.-AFP