Study on compaction characteristics of lateritic Soil/Quarry Dust - stabilized municipal solid waste

Abstract

Sri Lanka has faced a huge MSW problem due to dumping in the areas where lots of develop-ment activities are being taken place. It is very important to study whether those dumped wastes could be used for different applications as those wastes had been dumped from 30 years and abandoned due to public pro-tests in the last decade. However, there has been limited study on the waste material and this study focuses on the compaction characteristics after improving the MSW with either lateritic soil or quarry dust. MSW alone will provide a low dry density in the range of 1300kg/m3 and this can be improved by mixing with other local-ly available materials. Lateritic soils and quarry dust are widely used in the construction industry and it is re-quired to minimize the quantities needed in the construction industry in order to minimize environmental dam-age as well as the construction cost. With the proposed lateritic soil/quarry dust stabilized MSW will have sufficient densities and also reduce the construction cost considerably.