Serena Effective Communication 2018

Serena Koay graduated with a diploma in engineering with business from Nanyang Polytechnic.  She has a passion for environmental engineering.  During her course of study,  she had an internship at Siemens where she did experiments related to the recycled material. From the experience, she realized that by reusing municipal waste can help to  protect the environment.

This report was written in response to the call for engineering problem-solution proposal. In this proposal, the team presents a method to incorporate plastic waste into concrete. Building and Construction Authority has been urging the stakeholders in the construction industry to use waste as a construction material, providing a sustainable construction in the construction industry in Singapore. Therefore, the team is proposing to incorporate 30 – 40% of plastic waste into concrete. This proposal will detail the effectiveness of incorporating plastic waste into concrete. The team suggests to partially replacing aggregates with shredded plastic waste and discusses its benefits and limitations. Carbon nanotubes can be added in as a supplementary material to meet any specific design requirements. An evaluation of the benefits and possible limitations to these proposed solutions has also been included in this report.

14 March 2018 Mr. Huge Lim Building and Construction Authority 52 Jurong Gateway Road #11-01 Singapore 608550 Dear Mr. Lim, RE: Proposal for Incorporating Plastic Waste into Concrete Enclosed for your kind consideration is the following proposal for introducing a new design of green concrete through partial replacement of aggregates with plastic waste to Singapore’s construction industry. This proposal has been prepared in response to your letter of authorization for the report. The report consists of a description of the current situation regarding plastic waste, the rationale behind the proposed solutions, an evaluation of the benefits, suggested alternative solutions and a detailed summary of all related primary and secondary research. We target to reduce the plastic waste in Singapore and we have provided information on the methods to integrate plastic waste into concrete, and an analysis on how plastic waste behaves in concrete. We would like to expres...

1.0 Introduction 1.1 Background This proposal is developed in response to the call for engineering problem solution. for creating solutions towards reducing the amount of waste specifically plastic to landfill in Singapore. As Singapore’s human population has been increasing at a staggering rate of 4.028 million in the year 2000 to 5.612 million in the year 2017, the amount of waste produced has been increasing at an alarming rate. In the year 2016, 7.81 million tonnes of waste were produced compared to 7.67 million tonnes in 2015. Our only remaining landfill Semakau landfill is expected to be fully filled by the year 2035. With the pressure of our landfill filling up, NEA has been encouraging the local construction industry to incorporate more recycled and waste materials as building materials. (Eco-business, 2011) The construction industry in Singapore has been using waste materials such as Recycled Concrete Aggregates (RCA), Washed Copper Slag (WCS) and Ground-granula...

In the article “Building with Bamboo”, Ghavami and García (2017) state that bamboo provides various benefits when used in the construction industry. Bamboo is environmentally friendly as it grows in abundance. The article states that the structural strength of bamboo is comparable to steel; laminated bamboo has similar properties to timber and glue-laminated timber. The article further mentions about corrugated bamboo being effective when used in concrete. However, the article also states that bamboo poses challenges when used in construction as there are variables that are inherent; bamboo has geometrical irregularities and “high-water absorption and susceptibility to fungal and insect attack." The writers hope that multinational enterprises will emphasize reducing global warming by investing in developing more economical and environmentally friendly materials such as bamboo. While the usage of bamboo in construction is being encouraged, there are still further studies and develo...

The goal that I had set for this module was to improve my writing skills. Personally, I feel that I have achieved this goal as I have the chance to write a full technical report and the constantly updated blog posts for this module. Through the report and blog posts, I find myself being more critical of my grammar errors, sentence structure in the passage. Being critical, it allows me to be more careful in my writing skills.  I would like to use the skills that I have learned in this module into my daily life as it can constantly help me improved my ability in my writing. The main challenge for our project was the writing of full technical report due to the busy schedule of our group members. As the three of us are different project groups in other modules, it was very difficult to meet up and discuss the project.  This resulted that our group to have lack of communication. Thus, we decided to split the workload eventually and later compile everything together. This leads to ...