Enhancing the Strength of Clay-Sand Mixture by Discrete Waste Plastic Strips

Abstract

ABSTRACT The addition of waste plastic bottle strips to soil as a reinforcing material is widely used nowadays to enhance the engineering properties of soils. In this study, series of unconfined compression tests were conducted on clayey sand soil with and without adding strips of waste plastic bottle to investigate the effect of adding plastic strips on the shear strength of soil. Two types of plastic strips were used in this research depending on the nature of the strip surface whether plain or corrugated. Different sizes of plain strips (BxL) were used namely (1x5), (1x10), (1x15), (2x5), (2x10), (2x15), (3x5), (3x10) and (3x15) mm, while one size of corrugated strips was used namely; (1x15) mm, where B and L are the width and length of a strip, respectively. All the plastic strips are of the same thickness of 0.4mm. Both the plain and corrugated plastic strips were added with different percentage ratios of 0.25, 0.5, 0.75 and 1.0 % by the dry weight of soil sample. For a particular ratio, a significant increase in unconfined compressive strength qu of soil was observed when adding plain plastic strip of size (1x15) mm for addition ratio of 1.0 % while more increase in unconfined compressive strength qu was deducted when adding corrugated plastic strips of the same size and addition ratio.