Use of Plastic Waste for the Development of Green Lightweight Structural Concrete

With a production of more than 30 billion tons each year, concrete is the building material most widely used in the world, which means a high environmental impact, especially in terms of carbon dioxide emissions and consumption of raw materials. Moreover, some of the industrial wastes are unavoidable, hence there is an increasing interest in finding new solutions for their recycling. To this end, this work aims at the development of innovative concretes able to meet the new trends related to sustainability, from a circular economy perspective. In particular, two different kinds of waste are investigated to be inserted in the concrete mix: plastic, which derives from industrial processing waste but is mixed in composition, so making it difficult to reuse or recycle, as well as biochar, which is the solid carbonaceous by-product resulting from wood-waste pyro-gasification. The developed concretes are characterized in terms of physical-mechanical performance, in order to assess the feasibility of using these industrial wastes as secondary raw materials for the building industry.