Where to use RCC building waste

This article is on how to reuse waste generated from a demolished RCC building. After reading this article you will understand where and how we know how the waste can be put to effective use?

Construction and Demolition recycling, is created when buildings are destroyed or during the construction process. These materials include concrete, metal, brick, lumber, drywall, carpet, pipe, plastic, and other materials used in construction.
Recycling materials account for around 25 percent of all materials that are processed through recycling centers. While the use of green building techniques has helped to reduce the amount of waste materials, there is still a large amount of these items that must be recycled, creating the need for advanced construction and demolition processing systems.

As far as RCC demolition is concerned waste generated are due to the concrete and steel bars used in construction of RCC buildings.

Before we go to reuse the waste from demolition of RCC building Let us first see what could be the exact nature of the waste. This waste can be divided into two parts:
1. Debries
2. Rubbish and scrap rebars.

Where can we use the debries?

First of all steel and concrete are to be separated and concrete aggregate can be crushed and cleaned so that rubbish and scrap rebars collected .After demolishing an RCC building there may be varying size of lumps. The sizes vary from 100 mm to 600 mm. The bigger lumps shall have to be pulverized with a breaker and reduced to a size of 100 mm to 150 mm average size. The reinforcement bars shall have to be gas cut and made free from the lumps.

Resuse of Debries

• We use debries for Plum concrete the basic filling material can be between 150 mm to 200 mm.
• Debries can be used for Rubble soling. These can be used in place of boulders or rubble
• Debries can be used in the Plinth filling for for general area filling.this can be used in place of boulders or rubble
• The concrete portion of the RCC waste can be crushed in machines and used as fine aggregate in Road construction

NOTE : There is no possibility of any use of debries in RCC structures Because for concrete M-20 and above , the specified aggregate size is 15 mm to 25 mm.

Where we can use rubbish and scrap rebars

Reuse of Rubbish and Scrap Rebars. After some work is done on rubbish and scrap rebars, these are then send back to the melting furnace where these shall be re-incarnated into freshly rolled bars.
But these cant use  be used for reinforcement in RCC members.


There are two reasons:

1. The scale formation on the rusted steel bars shall prevent effective bond between the bars and the fresh concrete.
2. The varying sizes and shapes and condition of the recovered bars shall discourage any fitter from using them on a fresh beam, column or slab cage.

Hope this short article gives some idea where to use demolished RCC building materials.
Happy recycling!