Reuse of ribbon archs as reinforcement element in retaining walls with face made by concrete blocks

This papper shows a retaining wall construction with face made of concrete blocks without grouting utilization, and stability analysis. It reused polyester ribbon as reinforcement element in soil for minimize building cost of this kind of building and decrease environmental impact, the reuse of polyester ribbon reduces waste production of difficult decomposition. A prototype was built in order to prove that is possible and practicable the building of this type of structure and the execution was based in parameters applied in soil reinforcement program. The prototype was built with a factor of safety of 2, for agree to the stability for execution of permanent buildings, and was applied overload on the structure made of soil, verified the expected good behavior of the retaining wall, supporting an overload of 24 kN. Besides, ten-sile strenght tests on the ribbon used in the building allowed compare the value adopted as real resistence value reached by the ribbon tested and them these data comproved the experiment efficiency.