JESUS IS LORD COLLEGES FOUNDATION INC.

101 Bunlo, Bocaue, Bulacan

Junior High School Department
S.Y. 2019-2020
INVESTIGATORY PROJECT

Cement Mixed with Plastic

Submitted by:

Alcantara, Jerome

Alejandro, Seth Nathan

Alejandro, Jhon Carlo

Arias, Gerald Christian

Bate, Renz David

Bartolome, Sunshine

Casas, Reverie

Dela Cruz, Ara Kristine

Dela Cruz, Jhazmin

9-Forgiver
Objectives

A. By combining plastic with cement, we can significantly reduce plastic waste,

B. It can act as a great substitute for the materials we usually use in making concrete,

C. To evaluate the effects of the added granulated plastic on the compressive strength and

density of the concrete.

Abstract

Concrete is the most widely used construction material in the world. These materials are

often used in residential driveways, paving and curb, walls, house foundations and gutter

applications. Sustainable concrete structures are beneficial as it consumed less energy, release less

greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, and cost less to build and to maintain over the given period.

Solid waste management is one of the major environmental concerns in the country today. This

paper investigates the utilization of waste plastics as replacement for fine aggregates in concrete

to produce lightweight concrete. The aim of the research is to evaluate the effect of addition of

granulated waste plastics on the compressive strength and density of concrete. Portland cement

was mixed with the aggregates to produce the concrete composites.

 Chapter I

Introduction and Its Background

Waste is now a global problem, and one that must be addressed in order to solve the world's

resource and energy challenges. Plastics are made from limited resources such as petroleum, and

huge advances are being made in the development of technologies to recycle plastic waste among

other resources. It was reported in Dhaka City Corporation (DCC) area that plastic waste

generation increases at the rate of 10.43% per year in the amount of plastic waste, (Rahman, M.,

et’al. 2012). However, with increasing population in Nigeria, the amount and type of waste

materials produced tends to increase in that same proportion. In terms of plastic waste, once plastic

is discarded after its utility is over, it is known as plastic waste. These wastes (plastic) are almost

nondegradable in the natural environment even after a long period of exposure. So, plastic waste

is now a serious environmental threat to the modern way of living. It is not feasible to use waste

plastic for land filling, which require huge land space area and as well land loses its fertility. It

also causes serious problems such as clogging in drainage system, wastage of resources and

environmental pollution. In this consequence, big attention is being focused worldwide on the

environment and safeguarding the natural resources through recycling of waste plastic materials

in the recent years. It may appear to be valuable property as construction material. Polymer

aggregate is significantly lighter than natural aggregate and therefore its incorporation lowers the

densities of the resulting concrete. This property can be used to develop lightweight concrete

[Youcef, G. et’al. 2009]. Thus, utilization of waste plastic materials in concrete as aggregates may

be considered one of the most feasible utilization to overcome some safe disposal problems of

waste plastic materials.

Statement of the Problem

Solid waste management is the most pressing environmental challenge faced by urban and

rural areas of the Philippines, with population exceeding 104.9 million (2017), generates more solid

waste as population increases, living standards are enhanced, and urban and rural areas are being

developed. According to a report by the Senate Economic Planning Office (SEPO), the country’s

waste generation steadily increased from 37,427.46 tons per day in 2012 to 40,087.45 tons in 2016.

There is rapid growth in the Philippine population and the increase in population comes with

increase in waste generation. The waste is disposed in open spaces, roadsides and within residential

buildings. Sorting plastic waste and using it in construction will reduce waste accumulation to a

great extent. The continues rise in solid plastics waste and cost of building materials over the years

in Philippines and the world at large, forced researchers to look for ways of addressing the problem.

Plastics waste which is one of the non-biodegradable materials as stated earlier causes a lot of

environmental pollution, and there is the need to find solution to such menace. It was reported that

recycling of waste materials can be economical and therefore reduces pollution and contamination

(Dhir and Csetenyi, 2003). The problem with cement concrete are in terms of low tensile strength,

permeability to liquids, corrosion of reinforcement, prone to biological or chemical attack, poor

freeze/thaw resistances. Research and Development has a new dimension in the use of affordable

local building materials in addressing the concrete drawbacks, such as the use of waste plastics

and other admixtures for improving the performance of concretes. Research has been carried out

in advanced countries, on the use of waste plastic materials in concrete. The study also evaluates

differences in compressive strength and density based on variable addition of granulated waste

plastic in the cement-based composite respectively.

Formulation of the Hypothesis

If our hypothesis is right we should be able to create cement with moderate comprehensive

strength with low density. Which could be used in commercial projects.

Significance of the Study

Solid wastes are becoming one of the worlds major problem. By combining cement with

plastic we can significantly reduce the plastic waste we produced. It can lower the cost we need to

build structures because we’ll be using solid wastes. It can also act as a substitute to the non-

renewable resources we need to create cement like sand, stones, and gravel.

Scope and Delimation of the Study

This study is to evaluate if plastic materials could be used to replace the raw materials

needed to create concrete. We also wanted to find out the comprehensive strength and the density

of the concrete.

Materials and Equipment:

 Plastic  Water

 Portland Cement  Wheelbarrow or trough

 Sand  Shovel or hoe

 Gravel  Bucket
Procedure:

1. Purchase the right amount of cement, sand, and stone. The precise ratios will vary

depending on the type of cement, so make sure to check your bag or the instructions that

came with your cement. However, as a general rule of thumb, you will need one part

cement, two parts sand, three parts stone, and one part plastic.

2. Assemble your supplies. Mixing cement is a messy process that requires a lot of attention.

Assemble your supplies ahead of time. You will need your cement, sand, stone, and plastic,

as well as a bucket, a wheelbarrow, and a shovel or similar tool for mixing.

3. Dump your ingredients into a wheelbarrow. Use your small spade to shovel a ratio of

one part cement, two parts sand, three parts gravel, and one part plastic into the

wheelbarrow.

4. Mix the ingredients together. Though they'll be mixed later, it's a good idea to have the

dry mix thoroughly incorporated before adding the water. After pouring your cement, sand,

and stone into the wheelbarrow, use a shovel or similar tool to mix the ingredients together

until you have an even, uniform mixture.

5. Make a crater in the pile of cement. Use your shovel to dig a small crater in the center

of your cement mixture. The crater should be about half the diameter of the pile. When

you're done, your pile should resemble a volcano

6. Add a small amount of water. There is no precise amount of water to add to your cement.

You merely need to add enough that you form a smooth paste with the consistency of

peanut butter. Start small to avoid creating cement that's too soupy. Pour a small amount

of water, like half a bucket, into the crater you made. Then, mix in the water with your

shovel until it's completely absorbed.

 7. Test the mixture. Drag a shovel through the center of the cement. If the mixture is too dry,

the sides of the groove you created will crumble. This means the mixture needs more water.

8. Adjust the mixture as necessary. It will take some trial and error to get the right

consistency. Add water a little at a time until you have a firm, spreadable paste. If you

accidentally get the paste too wet, to the point the cement is soupy, add a little more of the

dry mixture to fix this issue.

Definition of Terms

 Cement- is a composite material composed of fine and coarse aggregate bonded

together with a fluid cement (cement paste) that hardens over time—most frequently

in the past a lime-based cement binder, such as lime putty, but sometimes with

other hydraulic cements, such as a calcium aluminate cement or with Portland

cement to form Portland cement concrete (for its visual resemblance to Portland stone).

 Portland Cement- is the most common type of cement in general use around the world

as a basic ingredient of concrete, mortar, stucco, and non-specialty grout.

 Gravel- is an important commercial product, with a number of applications.

Many roadways are surfaced with gravel, especially in rural areas where there is

little traffic. Both sand and small gravel are also important for the manufacture

of concrete.

 Sand- The addition of sand makes cement more binding. Cement mixed with water

and sand becomes mortar, the paste used to hold bricks together. Once you add gravel

to the mix, it becomes concrete.

 Water- is the key ingredient, which when mixed with cement, forms a paste that binds

the aggregate together. The water causes the hardening of concrete through a process

called hydration. The role of water is important because the water to cement ratio is the

most critical factor in the production of "perfect" concrete.

 Plastic- we used plastic as a substitute to gravel.

 Wheelbarrow- where we will be mixing the materials

 Shovel or hoe- what we will be using to mix the materials together.

 Comprehensive Strength- is the capacity of a material or structure to withstand loads

tending to reduce size, as opposed to tensile strength, which withstands loads tending

to elongate.

 Density- is a measurement that compares the amount of matter an object has to its

volume. An object with much matter in a certain volume has high density. ... Density is

found by dividing the mass of an object by its volume.

 Chapter II

Scientists Have Reinforced Concrete with Plastic Waste Instead of Steel

Researchers from James Cook University in Australia have created a type of concrete that's

reinforced by plastic waste, rather than steel. The technique, which is a first in Australia, will

greatly reduce the environmental impact of concrete, and we can't help but wonder why we're not

doing this already. “Using recycled plastic, we were able to get more than a 90 percent saving on

CO2 emissions and fossil fuel usage compared to using the traditional steel mesh reinforcing," said

Rabin Tuladhar, the lead researcher from JCU in a press release. "The recycled plastic also has

obvious environmental advantages over using virgin plastic fibres.”

The concrete was reinforced using recycled polypropylene plastic instead, and strength and

durability tests show that the end result could be used to build footpaths and precast elements such

as drainage pits and concrete sleepers. Tuladhar is now working with local concrete producers to

find out how to apply the findings more broadly. He's also working on making concrete more

sustainable in other ways, such as replacing natural sand with 100 percent crusher dust, which is a

byproduct of stone quarries, and replacing cement with up to 30 percent mining waste.

Concrete is the second most-used material on Earth, second only to water, and production of

cement, one of its key ingredients, is responsible for 5 percent of the world's annual CO2

production. Which may not sound that much in the grand scheme of things, but if we can reduce

those emissions while also doing something useful with our hundreds of thousands of tonnes of

plastic waste each year, then that's pretty damn exciting. We can't wait to see the new material in

action.

 https://www.sciencealert.com/scientists-have-made-concrete-using-plastic-waste-and-it-

s-just-as-strong-as-regular-concrete
Performance of structural concrete with recycled plastic waste as replacement for sand

Highlights:

 Eleven concrete mixes tested with plastic as partial replacement for sand.

 Target compressive strength of 54 MPa to replicate structural concrete.

 Control of particle size distribution minimises change in compressive strength.

 PET fragments graded as sand can be used at a replacement ratio of 10%.

 Save 820 Mt sand per year by replacement with waste plastic.

- https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0950061817323474

MIT students fortify concrete by adding recycled plastic

Discarded plastic bottles could one day be used to build stronger, more flexible concrete structures,

from sidewalks and street barriers, to buildings and bridges, according to a new study.

MIT undergraduate students have found that, by exposing plastic flakes to small, harmless doses

of gamma radiation, then pulverizing the flakes into a fine powder, they can mix the irradiated

plastic with cement paste and fly ash to produce concrete that is up to 15 percent stronger than

conventional concrete.

Concrete is, after water, the second most widely used material on the planet. The manufacturing

of concrete generates about 4.5 percent of the world’s human-induced carbon dioxide emissions.

Replacing even a small portion of concrete with irradiated plastic could thus help reduce the

cement industry’s global carbon footprint.

Reusing plastics as concrete additives could also redirect old water and soda bottles, the bulk of

which would otherwise end up in a landfill.

“There is a huge amount of plastic that is landfilled every year,” says Michael Short, an assistant

professor in MIT’s Department of Nuclear Science and Engineering. “Our technology takes plastic
out of the landfill, locks it up in concrete, and also uses less cement to make the concrete, which

makes fewer carbon dioxide emissions. This has the potential to pull plastic landfill waste out of

the landfill and into buildings, where it could actually help to make them stronger.”

The team includes Carolyn Schaefer ’17 and MIT senior Michael Ortega, who initiated the

research as a class project; Kunal Kupwade-Patil, a research scientist in the Department of Civil

and Environmental Engineering; Anne White, an associate professor in the Department of Nuclear

Science and Engineering; Oral Büyüköztürk, a professor in the Department of Civil and

Environmental Engineering; Carmen Soriano of Argonne National Laboratory; and Short. The

new paper appears in the journal Waste Management.

“This is a part of our dedicated effort in our laboratory for involving undergraduates in outstanding

research experiences dealing with innovations in search of new, better concrete materials with a

diverse class of additives of different chemistries,” says Büyüköztürk, who is the director of

Laboratory for Infrastructure Science and Sustainability. “The findings from this undergraduate

student project open a new arena in the search for solutions to sustainable infrastructure.”

An idea, crystallized

Schaefer and Ortega began to explore the possibility of plastic-reinforced concrete as part of

22.033 (Nuclear Systems Design Project), in which students were asked to pick their own project.

“They wanted to find ways to lower carbon dioxide emissions that weren’t just, ‘let’s build nuclear

reactors,’” Short says. “Concrete production is one of the largest sources of carbon dioxide, and

they got to thinking, ‘how could we attack that?’ They looked through the literature, and then an

idea crystallized.”

The students learned that others have tried to introduce plastic into cement mixtures, but the plastic

weakened the resulting concrete. Investigating further, they found evidence that exposing plastic
to doses of gamma radiation makes the material’s crystalline structure change in a way that the

plastic becomes stronger, stiffer, and tougher. Would irradiating plastic actually work to strengthen

concrete?

To answer that question, the students first obtained flakes of polyethylene terephthalate — plastic

material used to make water and soda bottles — from a local recycling facility. Schaefer and

Ortega manually sorted through the flakes to remove bits of metal and other debris. They then

walked the plastic samples down to the basement of MIT’s Building 8, which houses a cobalt-60

irradiator that emits gamma rays, a radiation source that is typically used commercially to

decontaminate food.

“There’s no residual radioactivity from this type of irradiation,” Short says. “If you stuck

something in a reactor and irradiated it with neutrons, it would come out radioactive. But gamma

rays are a different kind of radiation that, under most circumstances, leave no trace of radiation.”

The team exposed various batches of flakes to either a low or high dose of gamma rays. They then

ground each batch of flakes into a powder and mixed the powders with a series of cement paste

samples, each with traditional Portland cement powder and one of two common mineral additives:

fly ash (a byproduct of coal combustion) and silica fume (a byproduct of silicon production). Each

sample contained about 1.5 percent irradiated plastic.

Once the samples were mixed with water, the researchers poured the mixtures into cylindrical

molds, allowed them to cure, removed the molds, and subjected the resulting concrete cylinders to

compression tests. They measured the strength of each sample and compared it with similar

samples made with regular, nonirradiated plastic, as well as with samples containing no plastic at

all.
They found that, in general, samples with regular plastic were weaker than those without any

plastic. The concrete with fly ash or silica fume was stronger than concrete made with just Portland

cement. And the presence of irradiated plastic along with fly ash strengthened the concrete even

further, increasing its strength by up to 15 percent compared with samples made just with Portland

cement, particularly in samples with high-dose irradiated plastic.

The concrete road ahead

After the compression tests, the researchers went one step further, using various imaging

techniques to examine the samples for clues as to why irradiated plastic yielded stronger concrete.

The team took their samples to Argonne National Laboratory and the Center for Materials Science

and Engineering (CMSE) at MIT, where they analyzed them using X-ray diffraction, backscattered

electron microscopy, and X-ray microtomography. The high-resolution images revealed that

samples containing irradiated plastic, particularly at high doses, exhibited crystalline structures

with more cross-linking, or molecular connections. In these samples, the crystalline structure also

seemed to block pores within concrete, making the samples more dense and therefore stronger.

“At a nano-level, this irradiated plastic affects the crystallinity of concrete,” Kupwade-Patil says.

“The irradiated plastic has some reactivity, and when it mixes with Portland cement and fly ash,

all three together give the magic formula, and you get stronger concrete.”

“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,” Kupwade-Patil says. “The method has

the potential to achieve sustainable solutions with improved performance for both structural and

nonstructural applications.”
Going forward, the team is planning to experiment with different types of plastics, along with

various doses of gamma radiation, to determine their effects on concrete. For now, they have found

that substituting about 1.5 percent of concrete with irradiated plastic can significantly improve its

strength. While that may seem like a small fraction, Short says, implemented on a global scale,

replacing even that amount of concrete could have a significant impact.

“Concrete produces about 4.5 percent of the world’s carbon dioxide emissions,” Short says. “Take

out 1.5 percent of that, and you’re already talking about 0.0675 percent of the world’s carbon

dioxide emissions. That’s a huge amount of greenhouse gases in one fell swoop.”

“This research is a perfect example of interdisciplinary multiteam work toward creative solutions,

and represents a model educational experience,” Büyüköztürk says.

This story has been updated to clarify that concrete containing both irradiated plastic and fly ash,

rather than with irradiated plastic alone, is stronger, by up to 15 percent, compared to

conventional concrete.

- http://news.mit.edu/2017/fortify-concrete-adding-recycled-plastic-1025
 Chapter V

SUMMARY

Floor wax is a solution that has been used since centuries for floor care. Most people prefer

manmade and synthetic floor waxes. The incredible amount of synthetic materials and

chemicals used in most waxes is harmful for our body. As a substitute, we utilized banana,

kerosene and beeswax to create alternative floor wax. These kind of waxes are great for

the environment.

CONCLUSION

We therfore conclude that, using synthetic floor waxes maybe a lot cheaper that doing an

alternative floor wax that’s why most people buy it. The harmful chemicals included in this

kind of floor wax can affect our health. It can lead to health problems or damage living

plants due to exposure. Our research about banana floor wax will help people reduce their

waste and it is an eco-friendly product. Natural and non-toxic products can make a

difference in our environment.

RECOMMENDATION

Floor wax maintains our houses clean and make our floors shiny. Store-bought floor waxes

contain a number of hazardous chemicals. Doing alternatives like, Banana Floor Wax is

good for the environment.

These Banana Floor Wax includes natural ingredients such as banana peelings and

beeswax. Adding an lavender essential oil will make it smell a lot better.