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Sustainable Structural Lightweight Concrete with Recycled Polyethylene Terephthalate Waste Aggregate

Author(s): ORCID
ORCID




Medium: journal article
Language(s): English
Published in: Buildings, , n. 3, v. 14
Page(s): 609
DOI: 10.3390/buildings14030609
Abstract:

Plastic is a widely consumed material with a high decomposition time, occupying significant space in landfills and dumps. Thus, strategies to reuse plastic waste are imperative for environmental benefit. Plastic waste is a promising eco-friendly building material for cement-based composites due to its reduced specific gravity and thermal conductivity. However, this waste reduces the composites’ mechanical strength. This work aims to produce and evaluate lightweight concretes made with only lightweight aggregates and mostly recycled plastic aggregates. Initially, an optimized dosage approach for lightweight concrete is presented. The mixture proportion of the lightweight concrete was based on the performance of mortars with the complete replacement of natural aggregate by recycled polyethylene terephthalate (PET) aggregates. The PET aggregates showed irregular shapes, impairing workability and providing lightweight concretes with around 18% water absorption and 21% void index. However, the concretes presented significantly low-unit weight, approximately 1200 kg/m3. This work presented a structural lightweight concrete (ACI 213-R) using only lightweight aggregates and mostly plastic waste aggregate, with a compressive strength of up to 17.6 MPa, a unit weight of 1282 kg/m3, and an efficiency factor of 12.3 MPa·cm3/g. The study shows that with an optimum dosage, reusing plastic waste in concrete is a viable alternative contributing to environmental sustainability.

Copyright: © 2024 by the authors; licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland.
License:

This creative work has been published under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC-BY 4.0) license which allows copying, and redistribution as well as adaptation of the original work provided appropriate credit is given to the original author and the conditions of the license are met.

  • About this
    data sheet
  • Reference-ID
    10773870
  • Published on:
    29/04/2024
  • Last updated on:
    05/06/2024
 
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