Shredded Tires and Rubber-Sand as Lightweight Backfill

Abstract

The growing interest in utilizing waste materials in civil engineering applications has opened the possibility of constructing reinforced soil structures with unconventional backfills. Scrap tires are a high-profile waste material for which several uses have been studied, including the use of shredded tires as backfill. A triaxial testing program was conducted to investigate the stress-strain relationship and strength of tire chips and a mixture of sand and tire chips. The test results and additional information from the literature were used in the numerical modeling of wall backfills, both unreinforced and reinforced with geosynthetics. The numerical modeling results suggest tire shreds, particularly when mixed with sand, may be effectively used as backfill.