Utilization of plastic waste and polystyrene in making light weight red soil fly ash bricks

Abstract

The plastic industry is the important sector in India which is more valuable and playing vital role in economy of our country. Even though it is an important industry, it produces few environmental brunt causing land and water impairment with some ill effects. The methods following for dumping, leads to ground water contamination and thereby cause other adverse effects. Many investigations have been organized in this area and found that the contamination level is greater in ground water and having problem mainly in dumping area premises. In the current study, an experiment had been made to reuse the plastic waste chips in manufacturing of building materials. The objective of this project is to identify the possibilities of using the waste plastic obtained from plastic product manufacturing industry as a brick material. The various test had been carried out such as compressive strength test, crushing strength test, water absorption test, efflorescence test, hardness test, soundness test and fire test for proving the modified bricks with conventional brick. The final outcome the test results shows that the lightest brick samples among the all tested four various samples produced the strength of 68.8% greater than the third class brick and its weight is around 33% of the conventional bricks. Light weight bricks are making by using lime, fly ash, red soil, polystyrene layer, decreased the self weight of the building which improved stability in earthquake situations.