Reclaimed Concrete Base Material

[TJ_Not So Civil Engineer]

Does anybody have a feel for what the definition of "reasonably free of objectionable material" actually means? The reclaimed base material the contractor delivered apparently passed all the labs from the materials supplier but it looked like a road to a landfill once spread across the subgrade with plastic, wood, and metal found throughout.

TIA!

 

[geotechguy1]

Well, they could have submitted a carefully selected sample for testing or be lying about the results, is one possibility. Contractors aren't exactly known for their honest, legal above board behaviour.

 

[AKSherpa]

TJ, Doesn't sound very good to me. Do you have any pictures? What is the material being used for?

 

[EireChch]

We use recycled demo material in the UK. I have seen terms like less than 1% by weight of deleterious material (i.e. wood, plastic, etc). Assuming 1% of a unit weight of 1800kg/m3 is 18kg. It would actually take a considerable amount of plastic to get to 18kg.

I needs to come down to the old statement 'if deemed unsuitable by the engineer', which is essentially the gut/eye test. You therefore need to have someone supervising the works.

 

[TJ_Not So Civil Engineer]

Thanks for all the responses.

The material is being used for road-base on an HMAC roadway. The design firm is trying to claim that objectionable material is included within the 1.5% by mass deleterious material allowance. This seems ludicrous to me b/c it'd take a ton of plastic and wood chunks to account for 1.5% by mass of a base sample containing rock. I mean half of the base depth would need to be wood in order to fail a test.