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Geotechnical fills are used for building roadway embankments, filling in behind retaining walls, and as backfill above buried pipelines. Lightweight fill reduces the load so structures can be built more economically. A new lightweight geo‐material made from recycled plastic bottles glued together in their original post‐consumer form was developed. The purpose of this work is to explore the use of this new material as a lightweight geotechnical fill.

Through a preliminary laboratory and field study, aspects of the physical and mechanical characteristics of the recycled plastic bottle blocks were investigated. This new material is currently undergoing field trials behind a retaining wall on a bicycle path.

It was found that the average density of this new material is very low, at 32.63 kg/m³ (2.04 lb/ft³), with 59.5 percent of a block made up of recycled plastic bottles. The plastic bottle waste stream obtained from a recycling plant is gap‐graded having approximately 25 percent of the bottle volume at the 2 l bottle size with the remaining 75 percent at the 500 ml bottle size. Unconfined compression tests on small ten‐bottle samples produced strengths of 60 kN/m² (1,250 lb/ft²).

Testing indicates that this material may be useful as a lightweight geotechnical fill over soft soils or behind retaining walls; as an energy‐absorbing crash barrier for highway, race track, or airport safety; as ground and building insulation for Arctic construction; as floating barriers or platforms for offshore work; or for acoustic or vibration dampening for manufacturing processes.

This work explores the use of large volumes of recycled plastic bottles as an environmentally friendly geotechnical engineering material. Engineering parameters for this new material are presented as well as a discussion of an ongoing field study. The information presented here is the first step in understanding this new material with respect to civil engineering applications.

This paper addresses the nexus of domiciliary care demand and vulnerable migrant women recruited as domestic workers, focusing on the role of two types of organizations operating at the meso-level: commercial companies and nongovernmental organizations. The purpose of this paper is to identify the ways in which these organizations seek to change the dynamics of paid domestic work and explore how they attempt to shape the voice of domestic workers and their employers.

An actor-based approach is applied to the metropolitan area of Lisbon, a relevant setting for empirical research given local developments in the realms of care, employment, migration, and public policy. Qualitative case study techniques of data collection and analysis are adopted. The analysis is based on institutional records and open-ended interviews with managers of commercial companies and activists of nongovernmental organizations. Background contributions are drawn from interviews with domestic workers, private employers, and privileged informants.

Data from fieldwork demonstrate that the organizations under examination offer a significant and innovative contribution to raise and shape the voice of both paid domestic workers and their employers. More than introducing a radical perspective on the nature or content of domestic work, these organizations are engaged in stimulating a more efficient and sustainable organization of paid care in private households.

Given the novelty of the approach, the present analytical endeavour is chiefly exploratory and much of the regulatory interactions and behavioural patterns remains in the penumbra. Suggestions for future research include a more systematic and detailed scrutiny of the role of organizations, as well as the incorporation of other institutional actors such as state bodies and charitable organizations active in this field.

The findings show that commercial companies and nongovernmental organizations may become increasingly influential in the negotiation of working conditions for domestic workers while they remain highly experimental collective actors. The policy recommendation is to incorporate them as privileged subjects and actors in the public debate about the topical nexus of care crisis and migrant domestic labour. From the standpoint of social policy, the marketization of care provision is still lacking this crucial step: empowering representative bodies and fostering dialogue between them.

The original emphasis on a meso-level of analysis and the choice of empirical qualitative examination – against a normative landscape of public regulation at the top and individualized actors down below – furthers the understanding of the topic and paves the way to promising developments in both scholarly research and policy debate.

In the last decades, migration of domestic workers and, in particular, care workers has grown into a significant part of movement from the global South to the global North. This phenomenon is referred to as the “new international division in social reproductive work” – outsourcing domestic chores to (mostly) migrants enables families in the global North to escape from the tensions arising from balancing productive and social reproductive work. This paper seeks to address these issues.

Considering two empirical examples of stereotypically male and female migrant domestic work – Polish handymen and elderly care workers – this paper puts the phenomenon in the context of the broader feminist debate on care work, global care chains and social policies.

It attempts to analyze how the employment of Polish handymen or elderly care workers in Germany results from and recreates social inequalities based on gender, class and ethnicity/citizenship.

For this purpose, it looks at both “ends” of this specific European “care chain” – the employing families in Germany as well as the migrant's families in Poland.