Green-Engineering: Reuse of Concrete from Bored Pile Head Trimming

The construction industry is one of the greatest sectors of the European Union that contributes to carbon emissions and to the production of waste. In this scope, the special foundations’ activities particularly provide a great part of concrete waste (CW), especially in pilling. Most of the contracts with bored piles include an activity which is the trimming of the pile head. This activity has the function of removing any excess concrete, needed for the casting process, from the structural element (pile) and putting the head in the final cut-off level. The reuse of this hardened concrete as riprap to armor riverbank against scour and water erosion in a near-site is presented as an eco-friendly solution that should be implemented everywhere by building a database of sites producing construction and demolition waste (CDW) and construction sites matching the need of such material in the vicinities. This would allow significant savings in the commercial issues of the worksites as a relevant reduction of the environmental impact due to the reuse of CW and the decrease of CO2 emissions. This paper describes a case study of recycling hardened concrete by trimming the head of bored piles at a construction site in central Portugal.