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RBU students make flooring tiles from plastic waste

December 13, 2019 04:16 PM

MOHALI: Converting plastic waste into flooring tiles sounds incredible but this has been achieved by the students of Mechanical Engineering of the Rayat Bahra University.

A team of four students has developed durable tiles made from the waste plastic. This was done as a part of their project work. The group members, Sahil, Ritvik, Shubham and Vikas said that the idea was to make the university free from the single use plastic and for this they collected plastic waste for nearly a month before working on the work of making tiles.

Sahil said that they got the idea during a classroom session by their project guide and Head of the Department Er Abhinav A Tripathi. The members worked on the idea for a month before getting down to making the tiles.

The efforts of the team have been lauded by Gurvinder Singh Bahra, Chancellor of the RBU, who encouraged the students to work on new technologies and also asked them to make the society aware about the use of plastic waste to save environment.Dr.Daljeet Singh Vice-Chancellor RBU, congratulated the students on this excellent achievement.

Dr Manoj Manuja, Pro VC, appreciated the attempt of the students and asked them to get it certified from the industry.

According to the team members these tiles are antistatic, antibacterial and antimicrobial and the load bearing capacity of the tile is 3.5 tonnes. These can sustain up to 110°C temperature and when this tile is immersed in water for two days there is no deformation in shape or weight. Tiles if damaged can be used to manufacture again.

These tiles are cheaper than cement flooring tiles because only waste plastic is used for manufacturing these. The team members used plastics from shampoo bottles, milk pouches, broken mugs, non carbonated drink bottles and bottles of shampoo.

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