Every morning, cities wake up with the burden of unsegregated waste and the dumpsites that are running out of space. Not only in India, but across the world, solid waste management continues to pose systemic challenges for urban governance, particularly in rapidly growing cities. Overproduction, poor collection systems, source segregation, burning waste, and overflowing dumpsites affect both the environment and public health. Meanwhile, I came across the news that the National Highways Authority of India (NHAI) is planning to use municipal solid waste for road construction, with 80 lakh tonnes of segregated (biomining) solid waste already used for road construction in Delhi and Ahmedabad. The use of waste-derived materials in infrastructure reflects an attempt to address two pressing challenges simultaneously: legacy waste accumulation and material demand for infrastructure development. Such approaches are often positioned as circular economy solutions and merit careful examination.
This raises a very important question: Does the utilisation of waste in the construction of roads make waste management better, or could this practice be merely hiding the issues at hand? To answer this question, we have to see deeper beyond the headlines and explore the planning, monitoring, and reporting of this process to the public.
An increasing amount of municipal waste has forced the government to find new ways of managing waste. Such approaches include the use of “inert” materials derived from the biomining and old dumpsites for the construction of roads. The use of waste materials to build the road sub-base may help minimise the need for new soil, sand, and aggregates. However, road construction is not just a short-term engineering exercise. Roads have a life span that extends over several decades, with continued contact with land, water, and nearby communities. When waste-derived materials are used, concerns about environmental safety, long-term monitoring, and accountability become critical.
From a policy perspective, inert waste is considered environmentally safe, but material recovered from legacy dumpsites through biomining may not consistently meet inert waste standards, particularly in the absence of transparent and publicly available testing protocols. While guidelines classify certain recovered materials as inert, there is limited publicly accessible information on long-term field monitoring of roads constructed using such materials, particularly in relation to groundwater and soil quality. This type of waste may contain microplastics, heavy metals, and other pollutants if it is unsorted. Also, there is a lack of public information on the testing of waste that is classified as “inert” waste. While materials may be classified as inert, the composition of waste recovered from legacy dumpsites can vary significantly depending on historical disposal practices and the effectiveness of biomining processes.
When such waste is used under the roads, it is in constant contact with soil and rainfall. In effect, over a certain period, during monsoon rains, the water under the roads can move through the various layers to result in leaching, where the contaminants can migrate into the soil around the roads.
In contrast to engineered landfills, roads are not constructed with protective liners or leachate removal systems. Consequently, pollution beneath roads is very difficult to identify and difficult to control. It might only be decades later, when contamination becomes evident in wells, boreholes, or irrigation sources, might there be any indication of the long term effects of roads being composed of inert waste. What it means is that the incorporation of inert waste in road construction does not eliminate risk. The risk that existed in dumpsites is merely transferred to roads that are constructed across farmland, settlement areas, and environmentally sensitive regions. This then raises a fundamental governance question: Are we reducing waste, or just relocating it under the name of innovation?
Conclusion
The main problem is not that we don’t have enough space to handle the waste that we now need to spread it out across roads, but the volume of waste being generated. Overproduction, overconsumption of products, lack of segregation, and governance gaps continue to drive the waste problem. These root issues largely remain unaddressed, even as technical solutions are increasingly proposed at the downstream end of waste management.
Once waste-derived materials are embedded within long-term infrastructure such as roads, potential concerns related to environmental safety and structural performance become difficult to address. In such cases, environmental risks may be locked into infrastructure that is designed to last for decades, rendering them less visible and harder to correct over time.
Addressing these challenges, therefore, requires a stronger emphasis on reducing waste generation, improving segregation and recycling systems, and ensuring the effective remediation of legacy dumpsites. Clear accountability mechanisms for both producers and public authorities are also essential to manage waste responsibly across its lifecycle.
If the problems of overproduction and these fundamental governance issues are not addressed, the idea of making waste part of the roads will be nothing more than a pseudo-solution (in other words, greenwashing). It is innovative at present, but it will shift the risk from the present to the future. In the guise of progress, are we to exchange the dumpsites that are visible in plain sight with the dangers that are concealed at our feet, hidden from our sight but not from our future?
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