Garbage Beam

Located in a hot desert climate area prone to strong winds, Egypt is made up of many homes with little to no roofing leaving civilians exposed to the harsh elements. The overarching goal of this project is to provide these homes with efficient and affordable roofing using concrete with common garbage materials as reinforcement. Through preliminary testing and tensile testing it was possible to narrow the focus down to two reinforcement materials: fish netting and plastic grocery bags. From there final beam testing and pull out testing successfully demonstrated the promise of these materials. With this, however, it is still important to continue research on the materials and improve on the design in order to eventually create a one-way slab roof and pass that design over to an NGO that can successfully implement it