Waste materials pollution has instigated a serious environmental problem for decades, therefore new initiatives have been taken around the world to recycle wastes into construction materials in recent years. This study applied the compressive strength as one of the key parameters to examine the characteristics of materials, it was conducted to investigate the efficiency of adding different waste materials to cement mortar mixture as partial replacement with sand. Crumbed rubber, expanded polystyrene (foam), shredded wastepaper, and shredded plastic bags were selected to examine the efficiency of adding them to cement mortar. These waste materials were mixed individually with cement, sand and water proportionally. The produced mixture of each waste materials was casted in standard cubes and cured in water for different ages 3, 7 and 28 days. The compressive strength of the cured cubes was tested, the results showed that over all tested ages, plastic-based mortar provided the lowest compressive strength variance values by -7.4, -6.7%, and -5.4% in comparison with tested reference mortar. Rubber-based mortar showed the highest variance by -58.5 % at 3 days, -58.3% after 7 days and -55.5 % after 28 days. Foam comes next to Plastic-based mortar then Paper-based mortar by -13.7 & -37 % after 3 days, -11.3 & -34 % after 7 days and -14 & -26 % after 28 days respectively. In comparison to ASTM C129, the results ranges supported the possibility of using cement mortar mixed with shredded plastic, foam and shredded wastepaper in producing non-loadbearing concrete masonry units.

 

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