Development of a Lightweight Low-Carbon Footprint Concrete Containing Recycled Waste Materials.pdfVIP

Hindawi Publishing Corporation Advances in Civil Engineering Volume 2011, Article ID 594270, 8 pages doi:10.1155/2011/594270 Research Article Development of a Lightweight Low-Carbon Footprint Concrete Containing Recycled Waste Materials S. Talukdar, S. T. Islam, and N. Banthia Department of Civil Engineering, University of British Columbia, 1012J-6250 Applied Science Lane, Vancouver, BC, Canada V6T 1Z4 Correspondence should be addressed to S. Talukdar, sudip@civil.ubc.ca Received 4 April 2011; Revised 27 July 2011; Accepted 27 July 2011 Academic Editor: Monica Prezzi Copyright © 2011 S. Talukdar et al. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. Use of any recycled material helps to maintain a greener environment by keeping waste materials out of the landfills. Recycling practices also can decrease the environmental and economical impact of manufacturing the materials from virgin resources, which reduces the overall carbon footprint of industrial materials and processes. This study examined the use of waste materials such as crushed glass, ground tire rubber, and recycled aggregate in concrete. Compressive strength and elastic modulus were the primary parameters of interest. Results demonstrated that ground tire rubber introduced significant amounts of air into the mix and adversely affected the strength. The introduction of a defoamer was able to successfully remove part of the excess air from the mix, but the proportional strength improvements were not noted implying that air left in the defoamed mixture had undesirable characteristics. Freeze-thaw tests were next performed to understand the nature of air in the def