Page 84 - New Trends in Eco efficient and Recycled Concrete

Recycled plastic
3

1
Aliakbar Gholampour and Togay Ozbakkaloglu 2
1
School of Civil, Environmental and Mining Engineering, The University of Adelaide,
2
Australia, School of Engineering and Technology, University of Hertfordshire,
United Kingdom

3.1 Introduction

Over the past five decades, global plastic production has increased enormously,
resulting in the generation of a large amount of plastic-related waste. It was
reported that the worldwide production of plastic was 322 million tons in 2015,
which was about 90 times of that in 1960 (3.6 million tons) (PlasticsEurope, 2016).
It was also reported that 58 million tons of plastic were produced in the European
Union, only 30% of which had been recycled (PlasticsEurope, 2016; Kalargaris
et al., 2017). Plastics have promising properties of low density, high durability,
high strength-to-weight ratio and low cost. However, owing to the non-
biodegradability and chemical unreactivity of most types of plastics in the natural
environment, they cause long-term environmental pollution. Furthermore, toxic
compounds of some plastics can be slowly released into the air, water and soil
under certain conditions (Gu ¨ru ¨ et al., 2014). As a result, waste plastics are globally
recognised as a material with serious environmental issues.
Three methods of disposing, incineration and recycling have been widely
used to generate post-consumer waste plastics (Gertsakis and Lewis, 2003).
Among them, disposing and incineration methods create environmental issues of
depletion of landfill space and the release of the large amounts of carbon dioxide
(CO 2 ) into the atmosphere, respectively. In reducing the environmental issues of
waste plastics, recycling undoubtedly serves as the best option. Meanwhile, over
the past decade, the increased rate of urbanisation and industrialisation has
resulted in a significant demand for construction aggregates, which has led to
the consumption of large amounts of natural aggregates (NAs) (Topcu and
¸ Sengel, 2004; Ozbakkaloglu et al., 2017; Xie and Ozbakkaloglu, 2016). These
dynamics make the use of recycled plastics in the construction industry a highly
beneficial approach to reduce the environmental impact of both concrete and
waste plastic.
A large amount of studies have been conducted on the use of recycled plastics in
concrete. Recycled plastics were utilised in two forms, namely as recycled plastic

New Trends in Eco-efficient and Recycled Concrete. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/B978-0-08-102480-5.00003-8
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