BIOCHAR-CONTAINING POLYMER AS WEATHER RESISTANT BUILDING MATERIALS

Abstract

Due to the rising volume of pollution and waste production, there is a great sense of urgency to convert waste into sustainable materials (Das, Bhattacharyya, & Sarmah, 2016). Therefore, this paper aims to investigate recyclable waste materials, with ten samples of the biochar and coal fly ash-containing plastic polymers, on their performance as weather resistant building façade materials. To achieve this, these samples underwent blow torch fire, three-point bending and accelerated weathering tests. Subsequently, there were analysis on their performance. The experimental results have proven that the proposed composites were non-weather resistant and hence could not be used as building façade materials. Nonetheless, they typically displayed improvements in terms of fire and mechanical properties as compared to the pure polymers. Therefore, there is a potential to use them as substitutions for pure polymers. This would promote the recycling of organic waste materials and hence alleviating the concerns on the disposal of organic waste.