Comparison Study of Polyethylene and Polypropylene Addition on Asphalt With Lignin as Coupling Agent

Polyethylene (PE) and Polypropylene (PP) are already well-known as a type of packaging materials and resulting on abundant amount of wastes. On the other hand, fabrication of papers always has lignin as one of the by-products. These materials are potential to be combined with asphalt to create asphalt composite which will have better mechanical properties and higher water resistant compared with ordinary asphalt. This research focuses on preliminary observation on the effect of lignin, PE and PP addition in asphalt composite. Addition of 0.1% lignin into PP increases the penetration depth more significantly than PE. The increase of penetration depth is up to 350% in PP, and only 100% in PE. On the other hand, lignin addition into PP and PE have the same effect on the ductility. Lignin addition to both polymers increase the ductility up to 200%. In term of stability, PP-Asphalt is better as it shows only 8% ductility reduction after 0.5% lignin addition, while PE-Asphalt ductility is reduced up to 56.5%. The same trend also occured for hardness where PP-Asphalt shows reduction of 14% and PE-Asphalt is reduced by 32%.