Title: Recycling of plastic waste as coarse aggregate in concrete for sustainable development

Authors: Ramakrishna Bag; Subham Agarwal; Subham Subhasish Baral; Aman Kumar Singhal; Kishor Biswas

Addresses: Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, Indian Institute of Technology Patna, Bihar, 801106, India ' Department of Civil Engineering, National Institute of Technology Rourkela, Odisha, 769008, India ' Department of Civil Engineering, National Institute of Technology Rourkela, Odisha, 769008, India ' Department of Civil Engineering, National Institute of Technology Rourkela, Odisha, 769008, India ' Department of Civil Engineering, National Institute of Technology Rourkela, Odisha, 769008, India

Abstract: This paper presents a detailed experimental investigation to use plastic waste in concrete. Construction work uses a wide range of raw materials, most of which eventually ends up as landfill. That makes the construction industry one of the largest contributors to landfill waste and greenhouse emission like CO₂ worldwide. Experimental investigations were carried out to determine strength characteristics of concrete by replacing coarse aggregate with 10%, 15% and 20% processed plastic waste. Tests were conducted on concrete specimens to understand its behaviour under tensile, compressive and flexural loading conditions. Based on the experimental results, it was observed that 10% replacement of coarse aggregate with plastic waste aggregates provides the optimum results among all the conditions tested in this experiment. The concrete mix prepared using plastic waste can be used for mass concreting and low load-bearing structures.

Keywords: sustainable development; solid waste; non-biodegradable; plastic waste; concrete.

DOI: 10.1504/IJEWM.2023.129730

International Journal of Environment and Waste Management, 2023 Vol.31 No.1, pp.1 - 18

Received: 09 Jan 2020
Accepted: 12 Jul 2020
Published online: 22 Mar 2023 *