Recycled Glass, 3D Printing, and Sustainable Concrete

Concrete leads the world as one of the most in-demand yet polluting materials. It fills around 35 percent of all landfills with construction waste.

However, experiments show that concrete 3D printing is a significant way to reduce waste in building and manufacturing processes. 

Yet producers still use large amounts of natural sand to make concrete, costing the environment dearly. The good news: researchers have now found a way to replace that natural sand with recycled glass, opening a new worldwide avenue toward the sustainable economy.  

Karla Cuevas’s team from the Technische Universität in Berlin, Germany, developed a method to make 3D-printed lightweight structures using concrete, in which they replaced the sand with waste glass. The team incorporated expanded thermoplastic microspheres into the mixture. This reduced its density and lowered the thermal conductivity by up to 40 percent. 

The result: more robust and more flexible material. It flowed more smoothly in the printer, retained its shape, and hardened in less time. 

Using recycled glass instead of natural sand is easily achievable. Manufacturing now has a new demand for the millions of empty bottles and jars filling up landfills globally while contributing to the sustainable economy.

Source: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2352710221005763

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