Performance of sustainable mortars containing marble waste as alternative for natural sand

Abstract. The construction industry has been responsible for plaguing the environment due to the ecological imbalance caused by the extraction and production of building materials. To make this production of construction materials cleaner, the dependency on natural resources has to be reduced. Moreover, one of the natural resources such as sand is used more than any other natural resources in construction applications. However, the extraction of sand increased over time. However, the availability of sand in the growing demand of the construction industry will be a challenge due to a wide range of variability, cost, and quality problems. On the other hand, marble production plants that are widely used cause marble waste which is large in quantity. There are many environmental problems due to the disposal of marble waste areas that are close to the factories during the production process. This study aims to investigate the use of marble powder as an alternative to natural aggregate (sand) in concrete mixtures. Experimental investigations were conducted to study the influence of marble powder with various replacement ratios (0, 10, 20, 30, 40, 50%) on the hardened mixture properties with (splitting and flexural tensile strength and compressive strength) at 7, 14, and 28 days of curing in the concrete mixture. The result shows that all these properties improved for the substitution of marble waste as fine aggregate in concrete production. The findings found that the maximum increasing percentages in strength in compression and tension (flexural and splitting) at 28 days are (5.4, 7.3, and 5.7%). Results indicated that using up to 20% of marble waste in concrete production as sand replacement resulted in improved strength properties. It was concluded that the proper use of waste marble powder as a partial replacement of sand would have environmental benefits, and simultaneously, increase the feasibility of marble stone industries.