Earthquakes appeared as an unpredictable hazard. Globally, magnitude seven earthquakes happen more than once a month and threaten humanity, infrastructures, and economics. We aim to provide a method that not only reduces the detrimental effects of seismic activities but also low-cost and environment-friendly, namely, Multi-functional Geotechnical Seismic Isolation (GSI) Technique. In detail, the wasted tires first are shredded into small rubber particles, then mixed with the excavated soil and filled underneath and surrounded the building foundation. The GSI acts like a buffer layer absorbing seismic energy and thus cutting down dynamic loads. In conclusion, our method aims to lower the seismic damage by using the waste material, in that way, providing benefits toward the economy and the environment. Moreover, GSI could also be a ground improvement to increase the capacity and ability against soil liquefaction of soft ground.

The geotechnical seismic isolation by rubber-soil mixture (GSI-RSM) is innovative method to utilize a recycle waste material to enhance the seismic performance of a structure. This method is very inexpensive from current method to dissipate seismic energy that build in the structure. Furthermore, this method can be used in parallel as another measure to increase structure seismic performance.  Besides increasing structure safety, it can also reduce the cost of constructing earthquake resilient structure, since a smaller structure component adopted. The wasted tires appearing to useless, however through this method back to life and becomes beneficial.

Small and middle-size buildings are the first application targets for this technique to reduce the effect of shear wave by earthquake.  Besides this point, this technique can also be applied to the transportation infrastructures, ground improvement and ground surface vegetation etc. Rubber-soil mixture technique is a low cost and multi-function solution using recycle material. Replacing an original soil layer near the ground surface by a layer of rubber-soil mixture in a large area can create an isolator area that works as a safe zone.  There are advantages on the disaster prevention and mitigation for the transportation system and new town building of developing countries by using this multi-functional technique.