Sustainable development: Durability of natural geotextiles as erosion control product

Natural geotextiles made up of coconut husk is an emerging product for erosion control of soil slopes. Coconut is abundantly available in tropical countries and generates large quantities of organic waste, so use of it as an engineering material to preserve the environment is a good example of sustainable development. In view of the inadequate information on the biodegradability behaviour of natural geotextiles, a series of tensile tests were conducted on four types of woven coir geotextiles to understand the durability behaviour under the influence of different environmental conditions, viz. submerged in water, embedded in saturated kaolinite clay and moist manure. Basically accelerated degradation studies were done by keeping the specimens in adverse conditions. The results of the experiments established that most of the geotextiles remained unaffected in water and clay even after six months. However, the tensile strength of most of the geotextiles was reduced considerably in aerobically decomposed manure.