Building performance of sandwich panels made out of building debris and stabilized earth

Abstract

With the aim of promoting sustainable construction, several building materials with lower life cycle cost have been developed. This in turn would limit the over exploitation of natural resources used to produce conventional building material such as bricks and cement sand blocks. Building demolition waste has added to the environmental impacts created by the building industry. This paper covers a research carried out to investigate the possibility of using recycled building demolition waste (BDW) in constructing some building elements with a comprehensive experimental programme. BDW has been combined with stabilized rammed earth (SRE) which is another greener material, to construct a composite walling material. The optimum mix proportion of BDW and SRE was established together with other important material properties to assess the proposed material for acceptable building performance. Based on the results, the proposed composite walling system made out of BDW and SRE can be confidently used as a load bearing walling material.