Available online at www.CivileJournal.org
Civil Engineering Journal
Vol. 6, No. 11, November, 2020
2262
Exploration of Waste Plastic Bottles Use in Construction
Donald Kwabena Dadzie
a*
, A. K. Kaliluthin
b
, D. Raj Kumar
c
a
Department of Building Technology, Cape Coast Technical University, Cape Coast, Ghana.
b
Department of Civil Engineering, B.S. Abdur Rahman Crescent Institute of Science and Technology, Chennai, India.
c
Department of Civil Engineering University College of Engineering Tindivanam, India.
Received 25 June 2020; Accepted 07 October 2020
Abstract
The vision of this study is geared towards the exploitation of waste plastic bottle use in construction. This review paper is
centers on the recycling of waste plastic bottles as a construction material as an effort to help solve the housing deficit in
most developing countries including Ghana and to save the depletion of natural resources construction materials. In
Ghana, plastic wastes are discarded randomly after usage, hence scatter around in cities, choking drains, and end up
threatening our ecosystem. These predominant effects from the plastic wastes have necessitated the need for countries
precisely developing countries including Ghana to seek more sustainable methods to reduce the drastic amount of plastic
wastes in the environment. In view of the above, this paper focused on the recycling of waste plastic bottles as a
construction material as an effort to solve the housing deficit in most developing countries including Ghana and to save
the depletion of natural resources construction materials (stones and sand) are very much critical. In the reviews, an
effort has been made to utilize the waster plastic bottles in construction by filling the bottles with soil, sand, solid waste
materials as brick or block bounded with mortar as a masonry wall or the filled bottles are used as a substitute for the
production of the masonry unit production. In summary, it was concluded based on varying test result that: (1) Plastic
waste bottles are cheaper to acquire than most conventional construction materials and as such concrete or brick
containing any amount of plastic bottle is noted to reduce the total quantities of conventional materials required, thereby
reducing the cost as well. (2) The use of plastic waste bottles in construction contributes to environmental friendliness
and energy savings since buildings with walls constructed of plastic bottles maintains room temperatures and contribute
to energy saving and the cost of providing an artificial thermal control system.
Keywords: Waste Plastic Bottles; Construction; Materials; Masonry Unit.
1. Introduction
The vision of this study is geared towards the exploitation of waste plastic bottle use in construction. This review
paper is centers on the recycling of waste plastic bottles as a construction material as an effort to help solve the
housing deficit in most developing countries including Ghana and to save the depletion of natural resources
construction materials.
According to Zaman and Lehmann (2011) [1], in the surface of the world, cities cover only 2% however generate
about 70% of the world’s waste. This presupposes that more wastes are generated in the urban areas as compared to
the rural areas. Wilson (2007) [2] is of the view that a considerable upsurge in the volume of wastes produced
commenced around the sixteenth century when people started to migrate from rural settings to cities due to industrial
* Corresponding author: dadzie_civil_2019@crescent.education
http://dx.doi.org/10.28991/cej-2020-03091616
© 2020 by the authors. Licensee C.E.J, Tehran, Iran. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms
and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC-BY) license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).
Review Article