Strength Behavior of a Silty Soil Reinforced with randomly included Plastic Waste bottle's chips

Solid waste management, especially the huge quantity of waste plastics, is one of the major environmental concerns nowadays and recycling plastic waste from water bottles has become one of the major challenges worldwide. This paper provides an experimental study for the use of plastic waste bottles as reinforcement material to improve the strength behavior of silty soil. A series of consolidated undrained triaxial compression (CU) tests were performed to determine strength behavior of 4 mm width plastic waste chips mixed silty soil and observe the influence of fiber length (4, 8 and 12mm) and fiber content (0.25, 0.50, 0.75, 1.0 and 1.25% by dry weight of soil) on shear strength of silty soil. Also, one dimensional consolidation tests were performed to determine compression behavior of reinforcement soil by fiber with 4 mm width and 12 mm in length and fiber content 0.25, 0.50, 0.75, 1.0 and 1.25% by dry weight of soil. The results show that, increasing the waste plastic content and length consequence to improve the shear strength and reduce the compressibility of reinforced soil significantly. This additional strength and reduction in settlement can be useful for increasing the bearing capacity improvement, settlement reduction in foundations and soils improvement.

Keywords:

Silty soil , reinforcement , plastic waste , strength behavior , triaxial tests