Performance Evaluation of Sandy Soil by using Waste Plastic Cups as Reinforcement

Engineers from the past have endeavoured to find solution to many soil-related distresses such as settlement, slope failures, slides, and soil erosion. Reinforcement of soils can be done with different type of fibres, e.g. with natural material like Jute, Sisal, coir, palm etc. and synthetic material like as polypropylene, glass, nylon etc. Development of Geosynthetics over the years helped technologists in manufacturing various types of textiles to tackle from such kind of problems. This paper focused on use of waste plastic cup as reinforcement between the layers of a soil mass to increase bearing capacity of the soil. It had been used to improve engineering behaviour of soil mass and their results been reviewed. The main objective of soil reinforcement is to increase bearing capacity, improve stability, decrease settlement and lateral deformation under a square footing. The laboratory plate load test is performed and comparison is done of unreinforced sand and reinforced sand by the help of waste plastic cups. This study involves the investigation of the effect of waste plastic cups on sand for which a series laboratory plate load test have been performed with varying depth of placement, and varying the number of layers of waste plastic to increase the bearing capacity of sand and calculating the viii improvement factor of the sand. The laboratory test tank sand bed is prepared by soil rainfall technique and the size of test tank is taken as five times the width of the mild steel plate of size 200mm*200mm*20mm The size of test tank is 1000mm *1000mm *1000mm. It has been found that the ultimate bearing capacity of sand is increased upto depth 5 cm after that it decreases is increment in bearing capacity of sand reinforced with waste plastic cups twice in comparison to the unreinforced sand.