Sustainable use of supplementary cementitious materials from agricultural wastes - A review

This paper presents a critical literature review on the use of supplementary cementitious materials (SCMs) from agricultural wastes (mainly from crop residues) in cementitious systems. The current utilisation of these materials as partial replacement of Portland cement (PC) is reviewed with respect to the materials characteristic influence on performance and limit of replacement in cementitious systems. In-spite of the benefits of SCMs from agricultural wastes (such as rice husk ash, palm oil fuel ash, sugarcane bagasse ash), their heterogeneous nature coupled with insufficient data make it difficult to generalise their performance. Therefore, unravelling the relationship between the influence of the processing method and materials characteristics on the limit of replacement and performance in cementitious systems is essential to their standardisation and sustainable utilisation. This, coupled with the reproducibility of results will assist the processing and adoption of other agricultural wastes in cementitious systems.