Experimental Study of Cement Concrete Mixed with Combined Rubber and Plastic Waste Materials

Rubber and plastics are common commodities in our society. We use them from our car tires to the plastic containers on our dining table. But what happens after they are used or broken? They go to the landfills! To reduce the burden on landfills, proper recycling of these materials is needed. Therefore, our team came up with a project to optimize the usage of these waste materials before they go to landfills. Several uses of plastic and rubber have been investigated in the literature. A laboratory investigation will be launched, and various tests will be conducted with different percentages of the combination of rubber and plastic waste (5%, 10%, 15%, and 20%) replacing the fine aggregates in the cement concrete mix. These tests will mainly be focused on tracking workability and strength. Control samples will be prepared and tested along with each percentage of rubber and plastic mix samples to compare workability and strength at different curing periods (7, 14, and 28 days). These samples will be water-cured; to better understand the cement concrete behavior when mixed with our waste combination of the two materials. Test data will be used to select an optimum amount of the combination of rubber and plastic to replace the fine aggregate that would provide the maximum strength and reasonable workability. The benefit of replacing the fine aggregates with recyclable rubber and plastic within cement concrete mixes would be a reduction of these waste materials that normally go to landfills and the cost savings along with sustaining virgin raw materials. It is expected that some content of waste, rubber, and plastic in the concrete mix will provide the same and/or higher strength compared to the control samples. It is also expected that there will be correlations for resistivity for any conditions