Feasibility Study of Material Filled Plastic Bottles as Partition Wall Units

Rapidly increasing rate of plastic usage is in alarming situation in the present scenario. Plastic is one of the major cause of elevated global warming. Uncontrolled plastic waste disposal is leading to the conditions where the landfill sites will only have plastics into it. Also the environmental hazards caused by plastic are numerous. On the other hand, construction industry is flourishing day by day, but the homeless people are not getting affordable shelter. To maintain the personal hygiene and to improve the living standards, housing is the main necessity. In the current study, an alternative to the burnt clay bricks used in partition walls is suggested. A low budget housing has majority of its cost on partition walls made of traditional bricks. Also the manufacturing of bricks requires valuable top soil and fossils for its preparation and improvement. Plastic bottles filled with soil and sawdust is proposed to be used as partition wall blocks. The plastic bottles of similar sizes are sorted from the waste disposal site and filled with material and tied together to form a stable structure and bound together with 1:4 and 1:6 cement sand mortar mix. The cube casted is treated as single block of wall and is subjected to compressive loads parallel and perpendicular the axis of plastic bottles in the blocks. Compressive strength of designed blocks is tested on 7th, 14th and 28th day of curing and results are compared. The results clearly approved the use of plastic bottles in partition walls, as the strengths obtained were within the range and the material filled inside the plastic bottles were found to have no effect on the compressive strength of the cubes.