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 recycled material.  From the experience, she realised that by  reusing municipal waste can help to protect the  environment which can be applied to concrete.

This report was written in response to develop a solution for an engineering problem. 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 a new method of creating concrete  in Singapore. 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 express our gratitude to you for taking the time to read this proposal....

1. Introduction 1.1 Background Singapore named the “The Garden City’’ as it is one of the greenest countries in Asia. Thus, Singapore has been emphasizing on waste management as Singapore’s only remaining landfill is Semakau landfill. Semakau landfill is predicted to be filled by the year 2035. Singapore’s population is growing at a staggering rate every year from 4,027.9 million in 2000 to 5,612.3 million in 2017. An increase of 1584.4 million in the past 17 years.The increase in population eventually leads to the incline of solid waste generation. In 2016, there were 7.81 million tonnes of waste being produced as compared to the 7.67 million tonnes in 2015. There is an increase of 140,700 tonnes. Similarly, if this rapid increase in waste generation continues, the landfill would be filled up before the expected year. National Environment Agency (NEA) conducted several surveys about the different waste type, waste disposed, and waste recycled, waste generated and recycling...