ABSTRACT:

           In past few years, Marble is considered as one of the most important decorative building materials. Marble powder is the by product of the marble which severalty affects the environment and causes many health hazards. Waste is generated from sawing, shaping, and polishing processes. Marble industry produces large amounts of waste as environmental threat.

Construction work requires mostly two   types of cement: OPC and PPC ordinary and pozzolana.  Scarcity of good quality Natural River sand due to depletion of resources and restriction due to environmental consideration has made concrete manufactures to look for suitable alternative fine aggregate.

Accordingly, natural sand can be substituted with marble powder and used in concretes. Percentage of marble powder used by builders are still negligible whereas this disturbs the environment in some part of Southern and Western India are used. In present research real processed marble powder is not available and this makes manufacturing of good quality of concrete very difficult. There is a need for ‘clean sand’ in the construction from the point of view of durability of structures. Indiscriminate mining and quarrying is posing threat to the environment. As the demand for Natural River sand is surpassing the availability, has   resulted in fast depletion of natural sand sources. Marble powder is the answer for this problem especially when some states have already banned the use of river sand for construction.

In this paper the effect of using marble powder as constituents of fines in concrete by partially reducing quantity of natural sand as fines has been studied in terms of the relative workability & compressive as well as flexural strengths. Upon testing it is concluded that Mechanical strength decreases with increasing marble content. Waste marble can be used instead of the conventional aggregate in the concrete paving block production.

Keywords: Marble Powder , Concrete, Compressive Strength,  Aggregate, Natural sand.