THE APPLICABILITY OF RECYCLED WASTE PAPER AS LIGHTWEIGHT BUILDING MATERIALS.

Abstract

In this era of increasing standard of living and rapid growth of civil engineering construction, environmental issues pertaining to natural resources depletion, global warming, energy crisis, waste pollution and greenhouse gas emission have been major issues of concern throughout the world and most especially in the construction industry. This research was conducted to investigate the applicability of recycled wastepaper as lightweight building materials with focus on contributing to sustainability in the creation of the built environment. The major aim was to develop an eco-friendly lightweight non-loadbearing block from recycled wastepaper without the use of cement as binder. This study specifically addressed the drawback of low strength development that usually occur with increasing wastepaper content in the existing cement-based-wastepaper blocks. It also indirectly addresses; the environmental impacts associated with the construction industry (including; high consumption of natural resources, greenhouse gas emission, high energy consumption and so on), the environmental pollution resulting from unsustainable waste generation, and the generic drawback of high water absorption that plagues wastepaper-based blocks. To achieve this, research methods including; laboratory experimentation and simulation modelling were employed. The research outcome is an eco-friendly block unit designated as Cement-less Wastepaper-based Lightweight Block (CWLB) which contains 75% waste content and exhibiting properties that satisfy the requirements for application as non-loadbearing lightweight blocks in building construction. CWLB displayed compressive strength that far outweighs those recorded for the existing cement-based wastepaper blocks available in the literature. The properties recorded for the optimal CWLB includes; 2.71 MPa average compressive strength, 901.5 kg/m3 average density, 0.19 W/m.k thermal conductivity, 989.9 m/s ultrasonic pulse velocity, 0.0026 g/m2.S0.5 average coefficient of capillary water absorption and 883.38 MPa estimated elastic modulus. The approximate compressive strength of 2.38 MPa and 1.58 MPa were respectively predicted and recorded for the solid and hollow finite element model samples of CWLB. The impressive satisfactory properties of CWLB for the intended application and its eco-friendliness in terms of natural resources conservation and improved compressive strength suggests that CWLB shall indeed serve as a more sustainable alternative to the reigning/existing cement-based-wastepaper blocks and to the conventional masonry blocks of the same category. Amongst other things, future work will address the validation of the approximate compressive strength predicted for the solid and hollow CWLB insitu samples in order to take further the subject matter.