Use of ground waste glass in concrete production

Abstract

Use of recycled waste glass in Portland cement and concrete has attracted a lot of interest worldwide due to the increased disposal cost and environmental concern. Being amorphous and containing relatively large quantities of reactive silica, glass is pozzolanic in nature when it is finely ground. Thus, it can be used as cement replacement as well as aggregate in cement and concrete. Attempt has therefore been made in the present work to investigate experimentally the effects of white ground glass on hardened properties of concrete. Experiments were conducted to study the feasibility of using glass sand and glass powder to substitute natural sand. It was observed that the mechanical properties such as compressive strength, splitting tensile strength decrease as the replacement level increases. However, the long-term trend is that the values of these properties tend to increase. Thus, it may be concluded that ground glass can be used in concrete to replace some part of and fine aggregate.