India hopes to meet sand shortage for concrete with ground-up plastic bottles

Research carried out by the University of Bath in the UK, and India’s Goa Engineering College, has found that concrete made with an admixture of ground-up plastic bottles is almost as strong as traditional concrete mixtures. If 10% of sand in concrete were replaced with plastic, the University of Bath estimates that 820 million tonnes of sand could be removed from India’s streets. Researchers had to find a balance between the removal of sand and the addition of plastic. John Orr, the report’s principal researcher, said: “Typically, when you put an inert, man-made material like plastic into concrete, you lose a bit of strength because it doesn’t bond to the cement paste in the same way. “The challenge here was to have a limit between a small reduction in strength, which we achieved, and using an appropriate amount of plastic to make it worthwhile.” Richard Ball, another researcher, added: “Even when the reduction in performance prohibits structural applications, lower tech uses such as paving slabs may be viable.”