Mechanical Property of Plastic Lumber Produced from Recycled High Density Polyethylene (HDPE)

Abstract

Recycling is a strategy to combat environmental pollution due to plastic wastes. Of the many plastic wastes, researchers confirmed the possibility to produce plastic lumber from used HDPE plastics. The aim of this study is to experimentally determine the mechanical property of the plastic lumber produced from pure HDPE and its composite with wood to proof usability and applicability for different purpose. The experiment considered different conditions. Pure plastic lumber and wood plastic composite lumber is initially produced and examined under room temperature and below room temperature. Under each condition, bending, tensile and impact strength were examined. For each test eight specimens were prepared based on international standards and the experiments were conducted using standard testing machines. The result shows that pure plastic lumber has demonstrated superior load carrying capability, tensile load resistance capability and impact load resistance at room temperature. Moreover, the pure plastic lumber has an elastic nature and the wood composite has a brittle nature. In both cases the mechanical property of the plastic lumber permits to use for different applications. This has been also tested and resulted in similar phenomena at 20C below room temperature.