TREATED MEDICAL WASTES CONCRETE

Abstract

Medical wastes are hazardous, toxic and even lethal because of their high potential for disease transmission. The incineration process is the main treatment of medical wastes, relieving the products of incineration process still causes environmental pollution. In the other hand, despite the importance of cement, its production process causes a lot of emission of large quantities of harmful gases, the world's cement manufacturing process contributes about 5% of carbon dioxide emissions, which have negative impacts on the Earth's environment. Both of Bottom Ash (BA) and Fly Ash (FA) are the main outputs of the treatment of the medical wastes by incineration process. This paper studies the effects of the partial replacement of the Ordinary Portland Cement (OPC) content in the concrete with the treated medical wastes. Either Fly Ash or Bottom Ash is used to replace the cement content at certain percentages. Both of the compressive strength and the workability are tested at 2.5%, 5% and 7.5% of the replacement. The 7.5% replacement of the cement content with the medical waste fly ash gains 87.033% of the proposed concrete characteristic strength after 7 days of curing in pure water and 110.2% of the proposed concrete characteristic strength after 28 days of curing with pure water.