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Would recycled plastics be a driving force in concrete technology?

The aim of this paper is an attempt to answer the title question. In less than a century concrete has become the most widely used construction material and in less than half a century it has become difficult to imagine concrete without polymers. However, what about the future? I have already tried to answer a similar question (Czarnecki, 2015; Czarnecki et al., 2018). However, the positive responses, as a rule, are limited to niche concretes with special properties, such as “repair polymer concrete” (Czarnecki, 2018) or “future concrete”, “printable concrete”, but never commonlyused ordinary concrete. This time it may be different. The inspiration for this paper is a book (Pacheco-Torgal et al., 2019) entitled “Use of Recycled Plastics in Eco-efficient Concrete” edited by world-renowned F. PACHECO-TORGAL (University of Minho, Portugal) and his notable colleagues: J.M. KHATIB (Beirut Arab University, Lebanon and University of Wolverhampton, UK), F. COLANGELO (University Parthenope of Naples, Italy), and R. TULADHAR (James Cook University, Australia). The book, which has 20 chapters is written by 48 authors from 13 countries, and is global in subject coverage as well as in authorship. It presents a holistic approach, and reframes the total problem. The driving force will not be virgin polymers, but plastics, and not newly formed ones, but recycled waste. This move, from virgin polymers into recycled waste plastics and addressing the result as ecoefficient concrete opens a new technological era. Requirements are changing; now we are looking not only for “better concrete” but also for concrete with an acceptable performance from worse or even waste components, in short: “better from waste”. It is a necessary development in the search for sustainable development. A book which stresses in its title “eco-efficient concrete” encourages great expectations. However, it should be emphasized that almost every chapter of the book ends with the phrase “further studies are needed”.