Engineering behavior of a sand reinforced with plastic waste

Unconfined compression tests, splitting tensile tests, and saturated drained triaxial compression tests with local strain measurement were carried out to evaluate the benefit of utilizing randomly distributed polyethylene terephthalate fiber, obtained from recycling waste plastic bottles, alone or combined with rapid hardening Portland cement to improve the engineering behavior of a uniform fine sand. The separate and the joint effects of fiber content (up to 0.9 wt %), fiber length (up to 36 mm), cement content (from 0 to 7 wt %), and initial mean effective stress (20, 60, and 100 kN/m(2)) on the deformation and strength characteristics of the soil were investigated using design of experiments and multiple regression analysis. The results show that the polyethylene terephthalate fiber reinforcement improved the peak and ultimate strength of both cemented and uncemented soil and somewhat reduced the brittleness of the cemented sand. In addition, the initial stiffness was not significantly changed by the inclusion of fibers.