Employment the plastic waste to produce the light weight concrete

Abstract

In recent years, the use of recycled plastic aggregate (RPA) as an alternative aggregate material has been considered to lower the environmental influence of both concrete and waste of plastics. Recycled plastic aggregate concrete (RPAC) is now known as a highly promising technology that can contribute to resource efficiency in the construction industry. In this paper, the first experimental study of the properties of concrete manufactured using recycled Polyethylene terephthalate (PET) Flake aggregates is presented. Five batches of concretes were manufactured with different PET contents (1%, 3%, 5%, 7%, 10%) by the weight of Portland cement. The effect of RPA content on the compressive strength, flexural strength, splitting tensile strength and hardened density of each batch is studied. The results showed that the use of PET at 1% lead to increase the compressive strength in 58% compared to the reference batch (made without waste). Flexural strength results showed that the use of PET at 1%, 3% increases the values flexural strength in 23.11%, 25.59 respectively comparing with reference batch. Also, the ratio 1% of PET gives the optimum value of splitting tensile strength with increment ratio 130%. The density values clearly decreased with increasing the percentage of PET content, the decreasing ratio of density close to14% especially at 10% of PET.