Studies on strength and weight loss of paper concrete

Huge amounts of waste paper are discarded every year, of which only a minute fraction is recycled and the rest is dumped in landfills. Paper fibres can only be recycled a limited number of times before they become too short or weak to make high-quality recycled paper. This eventually adds to the amount of waste paper being generated and not recycled. It would thus be advantageous to use this waste as a low-cost sustainable construction material and make it a value-added product. In this study, Portland pozzolana cement (fly ash based), waste newsprint paper and water were used to prepare paper concrete cubes. Initially, investigations were performed to determine the optimum soaking time required for softening the paper fibres of the newsprint paper. The study mainly addressed the strength and weight loss of the paper concrete cubes with age. The results indicate that, at 28 d, the paper concrete lost 25–50% of its initial weight and a maximum cubic compressive strength of 5·40 MPa was obtained.