Experimental Study on Low-Cost and Lightweight Building Materials Developed Using Waste Materials

Abstract

Since the large demand has been placed on building material industry especially in the last decade owing to the increasing population which causes a chronic shortage of building materials, the civil engineers have been challenged to convert waste to useful building and construction material. Recycling of such waste as raw material alternatives may contribute in the exhaustion of the natural resources; the conservation of not renewable resources; improvement of the population health and security preoccupation with environmental matters and reduction in waste disposal costs. Different low-cost/waste materials like plastic bottles, polythene, saw dust, styrofoam, fine aggregates and coarse aggregates from different places are taken for regenerating building blocks. Automatic compaction machine has been used to find the compressive strength (fck) of prepared blocks. Based on the experimental investigation on plastic–aggregate blocks, it was found that the blocks with the proportion of 26% plastic, 74% fine aggregate have the highest strength when comparing with all other proportions of the plastic–aggregate blocks. Hence, it was concluded that polyethylene terephthalate (PET) bottle can be used as main constitution for the preparation of paver blocks with the increased strength. Though the compressive strength is low when compared to the concrete paver block, but it can be used in gardens, pedestrian path and cycle way, non-traffic and light traffic road, etc.