Treating Concrete like a Plastic, some experiments

Concrete is an old material, existing for many ages. The Romans built their Pantheon with it, although the recipes were quite different from what we use today. Developments in concrete are slow, different from plastics, which developed a lot in a few decennia. There is hardly any literature about why plastics developed so fast, but probably it is a combination of the fact that it was new and the pressure of marketing. Plastics are applied mainly in consumer markets. Another reason could be that weight does not play an important role in most, static, concrete applications, while in most ‘portable’ plastic applications savings of weight is important. It was decided to take a look at the development of plastic applications and see if a translation to concrete would be possible. We called this exercise technomimicry . Technomimicry is adopted from the popular concept of Biomimicry . Research by prof. Klaas van Breugel resulted in examples of successful biomimicry as well as technomimicry. In this paper attention is paid to the work of Van Breugel. The overall conclusion is that there are many green solutions in concrete to be worked out, but that the culture in concrete and building industry forms an important constraint