ABSTRACT
Waste tires have been used in a variety of forms in civil engineering applications as a lightweight fill, insulation layer, or drainage layer. This approach to recycling and reusing waste tires has significant environmental benefits over other methods of disposal or incineration due to the quantity of waste tires generated by society. Although many civil engineering applications have used waste tire shreds mixed with mineral soils, there are advantages to using shredded tires in monolithic layers. For example, a greater number of waste tires can be recycled when using monolithic layers and there are lower construction costs associated with avoiding mixing with soils. Further, monolithic layers of tire shreds have similar shearing properties to soils, superior thermal insulating properties, excellent drainage, and high damping ratio. When shredded tires are used in a monolithic layer a civil engineering application they are referred to as tire-derived aggregate (TDA). This paper focuses on the use of TDA as a backfill material in the construction of internally stabilized retaining walls referred to as “Mechanically Stabilized TDA” or MSTDA retaining walls.
