1. Introduction
COVID-19, a type of Coronavirus, has been instilling a worldwide pandemic that is continuing for most of 2021, bringing the ongoing list of environmental concerns that continue to grow daily (Boroujeni et al., 2021; Jaromír Klemeš et al., 2020a). In the early days of the pandemic, the World Health Organisation (WHO) introduced guiding principles around the use of personal protective equipment known as PPE. WHO has requested a 40% increase in the production of disposable PPE (Adyel, 2020). It has been reported that about 54,000 t of waste PPE were produced per day worldwide as of 22 November 2020 (Purnomo et al., 2021). The demand is expected to increase at a compounded annual rate of 10.6%-11.2% until 2027 at least (Patrawoot et al., 2021). This sharp increase in the utilisation rate of PPE is making its safe disposal very challenging. The single-use face masks and gloves forming the majority of PPE are now ending up in landfills or littering the streets (Jaromír Klemeš et al., 2020b; Saberian et al., 2021; Sangkham, 2020). PPE is being discarded along with other organic and inorganic waste and has also been found littering public places globally (Silva et al., 2020). Furthermore, COVID-19 related plastic has been observed in marine environments creating a potential new source of microplastics currently generated in our oceans (Anastopoulos and Pashalidis, 2021).
The majority component of this PPE waste is that of single-use surgical gloves that are made of PVC, rubber, nitrile, or neoprene, with healthcare settings preferring sterile nitrile gloves (Australia, 2020). Among various types of gloves, the use of nitrile gloves is proliferating (Patrawoot et al., 2021). With millions of contaminated gloves and other medical waste being generated daily that require safe disposal in landfills or incineration, they pose another environmental challenge for the community (Sangkham, 2020). Therefore, it becomes imperative for the research community to develop various recycling solutions that can increase the uptake of this clinical waste material.
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Although the applications of different waste plastics for concrete have been extensively evaluated throughout numerous studies (Siddique et al., 2008; MolaAbasi et al., 2019; Ferdous et al., 2021; Kadam et al, 2021; Steyn et al, 2021), the adoption of plastic-based waste PPE for civil and construction have rarely been examined. There are only a few papers that do touch base on the applications of such plastic-based PPE. Saberian et al. (2021) evaluated the effects of single-use face masks for road constructions concluding that the addition of 1-2% shredded face masks to recycled concrete aggregates resulted in an increase in strength stiffness due to the face masks acting as a reinforcement role when binding with Recycled concrete aggregate (RCA). Also, based on the studies of Kilmartin-Lynch et al. (2021), the inclusion of shredded face masks to concrete provided a rise in compressive and indirect tensile strength when 0.2% of shredded single-use masks were applied to the concrete mix, noting the increase was due to the fibres being more densely spaced. Furthermore, Rehman and Khalid (2021) conducted studies on COVID-19 face masks for the amelioration of mechanical properties of fat clay, concluding that the face masks show a reasonable improvement in the unconfined compressive strength. Additionally, Abdullah and EL Aal (2021) conducted an assessment on the re-use of healthy COVID-19 personal protective materials on enhancing geotechnical properties for road construction and concluded that there was a decrease in maximum dry density; however, an increase was shown in the optimum moisture content that was directly proportional to the number of healthy face masks incorporated. To the best of the authors’ knowledge, there is a lack of existing studies on the use of waste PPE and the inclusion of nitrile rubber gloves for concrete applications. Therefore, to address this research gap, an experimental study was undertaken to investigate the effect of the inclusion of 0.1, 0.2, and 0.3% of shredded nitrile gloves by volume of concrete. Compressive strength, Young’s modulus, ultrasonic pulse velocity tests were undertaken in addition to the SEM-EDS analysis to ascertain its mechanical properties, quality of concrete, and its bond performance with the cement matrix.
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