
Fortifying concrete by adding recycled plastic - jaboutboul
http://news.mit.edu/2017/fortify-concrete-adding-recycled-plastic-1025
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fishcolorbrick
This seems amazing to me - take trash plastic, grind it up, irradiate it with
a food-grade tool, then mix it with Portland cement 98.5/1.5 and it makes the
resulting concrete 15% stronger - and the resulting concrete can still be
reinforced by normal means.

You're taking trash, applying a tool that is already in widespread use, and
getting a better end-product out of it? Apparently the world consumes 10
billion tons of cement per year [0]; that means that we can dispose of 150
million tons of plastic bottles using this technique.

There's gotta be a catch - this seems amazingly good.

[0]: [http://concretehelper.com/concrete-
facts/](http://concretehelper.com/concrete-facts/)

~~~
fishcolorbrick
Further, 150 million tons of plastic isn't an insignificant amount -
apparently it took us 60 years to put that much in the oceans.

" 'In a little more than 60 years, we know we've littered more than 150
million tons of plastic into the oceans,' says Henrik Beha Pedersen, founder
and president of the Danish nonprofit Plastic Change."

[https://articles.mercola.com/sites/articles/archive/2017/05/...](https://articles.mercola.com/sites/articles/archive/2017/05/09/plastic-
waste-in-ocean.aspx)

