Study and application of mortar with residues of Expanded Polystyrene

The civil construction generates waste throughout its life, from the extraction of the used resources, the work implementation, until its demolition. It also has a very great amount of waste during the execution of the project being a great generator of ”garbage”, causing material waste and increasing the final costs. Furthermore, this intensification of disposed materials can overload the landfill, increasing the price of waste disposal and having a space shortage for this type of service. One way to make construction more sustainable is to replace the conventional aggregate with a recyclable material, minimizing environmental problems and reducing construction costs. In this study, expanded Polystyrene (EPS) was chosen to replace 20% and 40% of the sand which was used in the mortar. Although the EPS consists of 98% air and it takes up a large space to dispose, it has been growing and being increasingly valued in Brazilian civil construction once it is a lighter product and has acoustic and thermal absorption, differently from the sand which consists of 98% of air and it takes up a lot of space at the time of disposal. However, the reuse of EPS has been growing and being increasingly valued in the Brazilian civil construction.The tests of calorimetry, bending traction resistance and compression showed that the EPS is a good material for the mortar production and it has been proven to be a good material to compete with to the others on the market.