ABSTRACT
Waste materials are part of a crucial environmental issue for which recycling techniques are constantly being developed, such as the plastic recycling processes for example. However, materials involved in the construction field also result in waste. The building construction sector is one of the fields that heavily contributes to the production of waste materials at different levels. With previous attempts already developed from different fields, the aim is to integrate a series of waste materials with one of the main materials used in building construction: the concrete. Previous trials have shown that it is somehow manageable and possible to integrate plastics into the concrete mixture. However, the objective is to explore the possibility of inserting not just plastic, but a series of waste materials and in the greatest proportions possible to produce a concrete that would have enough properties to serve as a material for the production of urban furniture. The initiative of this research comes in line with the Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 9 set by the United Nations and set to be met by 2030. Therefore this research also aims at providing a small contribution to the SDG 9 by investigating the feasibility of producing customized urban street furniture with the help of parametric design and digital fabrication techniques, and by investigating the possibility of replacing aggregates in concrete by recycled plastics in addition to a series of construction waste such as polystyrene residues, stone-cutting slurry waste, and sawdust. Since the strength of the mixture could be assumed to have material performances lower than the conventional structural concrete, a maximum amount of recycled materials would be put into test in order to find the proper balance between shape and mixture.
