Physical and mechanical properties of fly ash-based geopolymer with disposable medical mask reinforcement

A tremendous amount of the nonbiodegradable microplastic waste has been generated after the outbreak of COVID-19 by the widespread use of single-use personal protective equipment, especially disposable medical masks (DMMs). This has caused harm to the health and safety of human beings and various organisms. Finding a way to properly deal with these single-use medical wastes has become an urgent problem. In this paper, an innovative way was explored to use DMMs in geopolymer (GP). The physical properties, mechanical strength, and resistance to high temperatures (200–800°C) of the composites were investigated. The findings of the study revealed that DMMs had negligible influence on resistance to high temperatures, but showed a positive influence on enhancing the compressive and flexural strengths of GPs at ambient temperature. The optimum DMMs content was 0.4 wt%, at which the compressive and flexural strengths of the GP composites were enhanced by 5.8% and 22.68% compared with the pure GP, respectively. The same polypropylene (PP) fiber amount increased compressive and flexural strengths by 7.49% and 9.76%, respectively. This thus confirmed that DMMs can be sustainably utilized in green building materials, playing a role as PP fibers toughening and contributing to the effective management of waste plastics.