Reducing the environmental impact of construction wastes by their use in the preparation of construction mixtures

At present, great emphasis is placed on protecting the environment. Civil engineering, mainly cement production, greatly pollutes the surrounding environment. Even the excavation of aggregate, which is one of the basic components of concrete, does not make any extra contribution to the sustainability of our environment. This paper focuses on the use of recycled concrete aggregate (RCA) as a substitute for natural aggregate. Concrete produced in this way is characterized by worse properties than standard concrete, mainly due to the properties of the RCA. One option is to modify the surface of the RCA and thereby to improve the properties of the concrete as a whole. By the mothode described in this paper, we have succeeded in reducing the density of concrete by 5% and total water absorption of the concrete by 50%, while the compressive strengths on the cubes with the edge 100 mm were 55 MPa.