Utilization of Plastic Waste in Concrete Mixes
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Date
2015-04-29
Authors
Abu Mahmoud, Ghadeer
Asad, Marah
Issa, Rinad
Saif, Thaer
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Abstract
One of the environmental problems that faces nowadays is the huge amount of plastic waste and the uncontrolled disposing methods in addition to the bad effect on environment due to several reasons; one of them that plastic is non-biodegradable.
One of the leading methods in overcome of the waste problems, is blending plastic with other materials to get new products with modified physical and mechanical properties.
In this project concrete was the targeted material that the efforts were focused in addition of different plastic wastes to its mixtures, like polyethylene terephthalate (PET), expanded polystyrene (Styrofoam) to enhance the properties of concrete mixes such as bulk density, compressive strength and water absorptivity.
Besides the types of plastics and methods of mixing with concrete, percentage, shape and size of plastic wastes were studied regarding their effect on the final properties of the concrete mixes, and how much they differ from the standard properties (i.e. compressive strength, water absorption) of the original concrete sample where they range from 250 to 350 kg/cm2 for compressive strength and 4% to 7% for water absorption according to Palestine and intentional standards.
Coarse granules PET were added instead of sand, 5% PET sample gave the best results of compressive strength with value of 389.7kg/cm2 and the density was 2.244g/cm3. On other hand, the compressive strength was less than the standard values when we added Styrofoam instead of sand or aggregate, the density of the samples decreased and the volume increased this is positive for economic side.
The addition of the Plasticizer to the concrete mixture with different types of plastic increased the compressive strength of about 8 to 10 % and increased the workability for all the samples and made it possible to achieve a given strength with a lower water content.