You Can Make Concrete 20% Stronger By Adding Recycled Plastic In & Also Save The Environment
The research began as a way to cut carbon emissions by recycling the plastic collecting in landfills.
Concrete is an oft-used material that¡¯s been instrumental in shaping our cities around the world. It¡¯s because of this that scientists are constantly trying to improve both its cost efficiency as well as its strength.
Now, a group of researchers at MIT have developed a new technique that uses irradiated plastic bottles embedded in a concrete wall to make it up to 20 percent stronger than before.
The MIT students were actually looking for a way to reduce the concrete industry¡¯s carbon footprint, which is currently 4.5 percent of the world¡¯s carbon dioxide emissions. The idea was to recycle the plastic that accumulates in landfills every year to improve concrete production.
How can plastic make concrete more powerful?
Until now, research attempting to use plastic in cement has proven to be unsuccessful, consequently weakening the structures they¡¯re used in. However the MIT team, through its analysis, eventually realised that treating the recycled plastic with gamma radiation actually made it stronger. This irradiated plastic was then powdered and mixed in with the cement, making a material 20 percent stronger than what we have now.
¡°We have observed that within the parameters of our test program, the higher the irradiated dose, the higher the strength of concrete, so further research is needed to tailor the mixture and optimize the process with irradiation for the most effective results,¡± one of the researchers, Kunal Kupwade-Patil, says.
But you don¡¯t need to worry, this sort of treatment doesn¡¯t make the material radioactive either. The research insists that, despite only 1.5 percent of the concrete mix being this irradiated plastic, it can help significantly mitigate our carbon emissions on a global scale. Not to mention perhaps benefit buildings constructed in Earthquake-prone areas.
