Impact of partial replacement of coarse aggregate with electronic plastic waste on compressive strength of concrete

Abstract

With the advent of 21st century there has been an exponential increase in demand of infrastructural development, electronic appliances and plastic manufactured products. Increase in demand subsequently led to significant rise in electronic-plastic (e-plastic) and construction waste. E-plastic waste includes discarded components mostly plastic and wires from TV’s, refrigerators, mobiles etc. which poses grave ecological threat due to its non-biodegradability and hazardous metallic waste. Cement, being the main component of construction waste contributes significantly in CO2 emission which results in global warming. Circumstances get more distressful for towns having significant population, where such waste ends up in landfill or incinerated either way polluting the environment.Effective management for e-plastic which contains both hazardous and valuable resources can efficiently terminate former while reuse the latter at low cost. Therefore Inclusion of such by-product as suitable alternative in conventional concrete shall absorb a significant portion of waste and will decrease the overall dependency on concrete whose carbon footprints and exhaustion of raw material are at times questioned.The paper thus aims to analyze the feasibility of partial replacement of coarse aggregates in concrete by e-plastic waste. The experimental study conducted incorporates determination of compressive strength on M40 concrete mix having 5%, 10%, 15%, and 20% replacement by weight of coarse aggregates with e-plastic waste and its comparison with conventional mix. A combination of acrylonitrile–butadienestyrene (ABS), high density polymer plastic and poly-propylene (PP) a low density plastic, present mostly in electronic appliances was used as e-plastic wastes in the experiment. A total 30 cube specimen of variable proportion ratio of cement, fine-aggregate, coarse-aggregate and e-plastic was prepared for effective test results. The inferences from test conducted as per Bureau-of-Indian-Standard (IS) concluded that notable increase in compressive strength was observed at 5% replacement of e-plastic. However further increase in replacement depicted a decrease in compressive strength.