State-of-the-Art Review on Utilization of Waste Materials in the Mitigation of Soil Liquefaction

Sustainability has garnered significant attention from the global engineering community in recent years. Explorations into the utilization of sustainable materials for enhancing soil strength and mitigating soil failures have been underway for several decades. This paper offers a detailed review of application of waste materials to counter soil liquefaction. Even though conventional materials and methods of liquefaction mitigation offer substantial resistance to liquefaction, these approaches raise concerns related to sustainability, environmental impact, and economic implications. In this context, utilization of unconventional waste materials to enhance liquefaction resistance stands out, owing to its emphasis on sustainability, cost-effectiveness, and environment-friendly practices. Different waste materials used for the liquefaction mitigation are discussed and compared in terms of their underlying mechanism of improvement. The paper also discusses the issues, challenges, and potential benefits of the utilization of these waste materials, to promote their use in the most efficient and best possible way. The discussion concludes that the utilization of waste materials in liquefaction mitigation outperforms the other methods and materials across different dimensions such as material availability, cost, and sustainability, providing a promising avenue for addressing liquefaction challenges in the present and the future.