Waste Plastic Liability to Sustainability

Photo: Prasad
Members of the team working with the extruder machine, which melts the shredded plastic and converts it into a continuous wire. This is further used in the moulding of plastic tiles.

Abstract: The environmental challenges thrown up by non-biodegradable polyethylene bags, bottles and other materials call for urgent recycling solutions. Widely used plastics can take more than 400 to 1000 years to completely decompose. To solve the issue of aggravating plastic waste, National Physical Laboratory (NPL) has developed an innovative technology to fashion plastic tiles out of refuse. The technology offers a sustainable solution to the long battle of plastic waste management.


Term Power

What is ...

Named after the ancient Indian mathematician and astronomer, Aryabhata was India’s first satellite launched into space by ISRO on April 19, 1975.

Antrix Corporation Limited is the commercial and marketing arm of ISRO. The office is based in Bengaluru and the organisation is a wholly owned government of India company.

The Mangala Valles, with Mangala the Hindu name for Mars, is a complex system of criss-crossing channels on Mars whose geological characteristics are very similar to channels carved out by flooding.

Doppler effect is the supposed increase or decrease in the frequency or wavelength of light, sound or other form of waves for an observer, while the actual frequency or wavelength remains the same, provided that at least the observer or the source is in motion.

The Oort Cloud is a giant shell of icy bodies at the very edge of the Solar System beyond the Kuiper belt made up of trillions of cold and icy objects.

Interstellar is the term used to denote anything conducted or existing between two or more stars. For example, interstellar travel is a term used to denote travel between planetary systems and stars.

Mangalyaan is ISRO’s successful Mars Orbiter Mission involving placing a space probe successfully in orbit around Mars since September 24, 2014.

Bhuvan is a software application which allows users to explore a 2D/3D representation of the surface of the Earth.

The zenith is the point on the celestial sphere directly above an observer 90 degrees above the celestial horizon.

The spectrometer is an instrument coupled to a telescope that records the spectra of a celestial object that can help in determining the properties of a distant celestial object.

The halo is the outer region of a galaxy, and can be composed of globular clusters, a few stray stars and supposedly also dark matter.

An event occurring when the Sun appears to reach its furthest north or south point relative to the celestial equator is known as Solstice. The celestial equator is a projection of the terrestrial equator out into space.

Collecting and interpreting information about the environment and the surface of the earth from a distance. The data is generated either by detecting the reflection of sunlight from an object or emitting a signal towards an object and detecting the reflection.

Geoprocessing is a GIS operation used to manipulate spatial data, which identifies the geographic location and boundaries on Earth. Geoprocessing operations include data conversion, topology processing and feature analysis.