COLLECTION & STORAGE OF PLASTIC WASTE IN TAMIL NADU

The village of Tamil Nadu is currently facing severe difficulties and amongst them is the
plastic waste problem, this issue has escalated rapidly over the past few years. At
present situation, Tamil Nadu is an underdeveloped village which has no trash bins or
designated areas to dispose of waste and the local community lacks the essential
knowledge in waste management.

Normally, the plastic waste is burnt in the forest or at the roadside as there is no current
infrastructure available to dispose of the waste. As plastics are made from oil and gas,
burning them will create lots of heat. It releases a huge amount of toxins and dioxins in
the air and affects its quality in the local areas. In some villages, there are ponds to
collect rainwater and unfortunately its common for people to dispose all their waste in
those ponds and by the time that those ponds are filled with water, people use the
rainwater for some of their daily uses such as bathing, laundry and drinking water which
it has a negative impact on their health and hygiene. This also has a negative impact on
the environment as the toxins and dioxins build up in the animals, fish & crops that local
people are consuming which will be affecting their health. In conclusion, burning plastic
is not an environmental-friendly waste disposal method and is not an efficient way to
deal with plastic waste.

To control this, rules and regulations must be implemented such as informing people
about the health risk associated with the current poor waste management, initially, this
will be done with a series of presentation and group discussions. Informing the residents
about the hazards associated with poor waste management will hopefully encourage
them to recycle. Furthermore, before the plastic is taken to the plant, it must be
segregated, and this will be done by providing different neighborhoods with a recycling
containers so that villagers could segregate plastic waste from other wastes. A village
committee will be trained to collect the waste from each house daily and rounds should
be made every morning to ensure no plastic waste are left on the roads. The container
are then collected using a 10 wheeler truck which will move them to be treated to
become the building blocks that will make up the houses.

There are two options for collection and storage of plastic wastes needed to produced
the blocks:

I. Stationary plant (temporary)

Step 1: The plastic wastes gathered from the dumpsters which are provided in
many areas of Tamil Nadu are collected using a dump truck with a capacity of
approximately 20 tons of waste.

Step 2: The truck transports the plastic waste to the warehouse rented where
the plant was set up.

Step 3: In the warehouse, the plastic wastes are segregated using a team of
trained villagers to separate the needed plastic wastes for the production of
the blocks.

Step 4: The plant is expected to run for 8 hours a day for 6 days per week
producing approximately 4350 blocks from 45 tons of plastic waste.

Step 5: The blocks produced are then transferred to the area of construction
to build houses using a heavy-duty truck which has the capacity to load 30
tons of materials.

Note: The plant is fixed on a 20 ft. shipping container (used / brand new) and
when the plant is needed to be transported in another city (e.g. Tamil Nadu to
Mumbai) then it can be easily placed on a 10-wheeler truck for efficient