Depolymerized Waste Plastic Aggregates for Sustainable and Eco-friendly Bricks

Abstract

Abstract The novelty of embodied energy, life-cycle costs, and reusability was utilized to construct an “Environmental Suitability Index” to recycle plastic garbage bottles. Bitumen was mixed with polyethylene terephthalate (PET) or depolymerized polyethylene terephthalate to make modified bitumen. The modified bitumen was combined with 10–20% sand, 30% gravel, and 50–60% modified bitumen. According to the previous determination for hardness, the best result for modified bitumen is 40% plastic and 60% bitumen. Different test types were applied for the sample, such as compression characteristics and sound insulation. Field Emission Scanning Electron Microscopy (FESEM) was used to study the morphological structure and elemental composition of the raw PET and DPET. The most prominent results are that the highest percentage for compression was 20% for the modified bitumen with PET, which was 7 MPa. In contrast, the compression of the modified bitumen with DPET was 6.9 MPa. The awareness is relatively lower than that of PET because the DPET contains impurities that appeared during the FESEM test, which caused an increase in porosity and reduced the compressibility. As for sound insulation, it is inversely proportional to the density of the material. Since plastic is a low-density material, the higher the percentage of plastic, the greater the sound insulation.